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Preliminary survey of prescient actions

In a short search, we did not find clear examples of ‘prescient actions’—specific efforts to address severe and complex problems decades ahead of time and in the absence of broader scientific concern, experience with analogous problems…

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Takeaways from safety by default interviews

Asya Bergal

Last year, several researchers at AI Impacts (primarily Robert Long and I) interviewed prominent researchers inside and outside of the AI safety field who are relatively optimistic about advanced AI being developed safely. These interviews were originally intended to focus narrowly on reasons for optimism, but we ended up covering a variety of topics, including AGI timelines, the likelihood of current techniques leading to AGI, and what the right things to do in AI safety are right now. (…)

Arguments for AI risk

Interviews on plausibility of AI safety by default

This is a list of interviews on the plausibility of AI safety by default. Background AI Impacts conducted interviews with several thinkers on AI safety in 2019 as part of a project exploring arguments for

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Atari early

By Katja Grace, 1 April 2020 Deepmind announced that their Agent57 beats the ‘human baseline’ at all 57 Atari games usually used as a benchmark. I think this is probably enough to resolve one of

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Three kinds of competitiveness

By Daniel Kokotajlo, 30 March 2020 In this post, I distinguish between three different kinds of competitiveness — Performance, Cost, and Date — and explain why I think these distinctions are worth the brainspace they

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AGI in a vulnerable world

By Asya Bergal, 25 March 2020 I’ve been thinking about a class of AI-takeoff scenarios where a very large number of people can build dangerous, unsafe AGI before anyone can build safe AGI. This seems

AI Timelines

2019 recent trends in GPU price per FLOPS

Published 25 March, 2020 We estimate that in recent years, GPU prices have fallen at rates that would yield an order of magnitude over roughly: Details GPUs (graphics processing units) are specialized electronic circuits originally

Continuity of progress

Incomplete case studies of discontinuous progress

Published 7 Feb 2020 This is a list of potential cases of discontinuous technological progress that we have investigated partially or not at all. List In the course of investigating cases of potentially discontinuous technological