AI Impacts

Hardware overhang

Hardware overhang refers to a situation where large quantities of computing hardware can be diverted to running powerful AI systems as soon as the software is developed. Details Definition In the context of AI forecasting, hardware overhang refers

Historic trends in structure heights

Trends for tallest ever structure heights, tallest ever freestanding structure heights, tallest existing freestanding structure heights, and tallest ever building heights have each seen 5-8 discontinuities of more than ten years. These are: Djoser and

Interpreting AI compute trends

This is a guest post by Ryan Carey, 10 July 2018. Over the last few years, we know that AI experiments have used much more computation than previously. But just last month, an investigation by

Occasional update July 5 2018

By Katja Grace, 5 July 2018 Before I get to substantive points, there has been some confusion over the distinction between blog posts and pages on AI Impacts. To make it clearer, this blog post

Trend in compute used in training for headline AI results

Compute used in the largest AI training runs appears to have roughly doubled every 3.5 months between 2012 and 2018. Details According to Amodei and Hernandez, on the OpenAI Blog: …since 2012, the amount of compute

The tyranny of the god scenario

By Michael Wulfsohn, 6 April 2018 I was convinced. An intelligence explosion would result in the sudden arrival of a superintelligent machine. Its abilities would far exceed those of humans in ways we can’t imagine

Promising research projects

This is an incomplete list of concrete projects that we think are tractable and important. We may do any of them ourselves, but many also seem feasible to work on independently. Those we consider especially

Brain wiring: The long and short of it

By Tegan McCaslin, 30 March 2018 When I took on the task of counting up all the brain’s fibers and figuratively laying them end-to-end, I had a sense that it would be relatively easy–do a

Transmitting fibers in the brain: Total length and distribution of lengths

The human brain’s approximately 86 billion neurons are probably connected by something like 850,000 km of axons and dendrites. Of this total, roughly 80% is short-range, local connections (averaging 680 microns in length), and approximately

Will AI see sudden progress?

By Katja Grace, 24 February 2018 Will advanced AI let some small group of people or AI systems take over the world? AI X-risk folks and others have accrued lots of arguments about this over