AI Impacts

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

Likelihood of discontinuous progress around the development of AGI

We aren’t convinced by any of the arguments we’ve seen to expect large discontinuity in AI progress above the extremely low base rate for all technologies. However this topic is controversial, and many thinkers on

Electrical efficiency of computing

Computer performance per watt has probably doubled every 1.5 years between 1945 and 2000. Since then the trend slowed. By 2015, performance per watt appeared to be doubling every 2.5 years. Details In 2011 Jon

Nordhaus hardware price performance dataset

This page contains the data from Appendix 2 of William Nordhaus’ The progress of computing in usable formats. Notes This data was collected from Appendix 2 of The progress of computing, using Tabula (a program for turning

2018 price of performance by Tensor Processing Units

Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) perform around 1 GFLOPS/$, when purchased as cloud computing. Details In February 2018, Google Cloud Platform blog says their TPUs can perform up to 180 TFLOPS, and currently cost $6.50/hour. This