AI Impacts

Examples of AI systems producing unconventional solutions

This page lists examples of AI systems producing solutions of an unexpected nature, whether due to goal misspecification or successful optimization. This list is highly incomplete. List CoastRunners’ burning boat Incomprehensible evolved logic gates AlphaGo’s

Historic trends in altitude

Published 7 Feb 2020 Altitude of objects attained by man-made means has seen six discontinuities of more than ten years of progress at previous rates since 1783, shown below. Year Height (m) Discontinuity (years) Entity

2015 FLOPS prices

In April 2015, the lowest GFLOPS prices we could find were approximately $3/GFLOPS. However recent records of hardware performance from 2015 and earlier imply substantially lower prices, suggesting that something confusing has happened with these

Effect of marginal hardware on artificial general intelligence

We do not know how AGI will scale with marginal hardware. Several sources of evidence may shed light on this question. Contents DetailsBackgroundConsiderationsEvidence from existing algorithmsEvidence from human brain scalingEvidence from between-animal brain scalingEvidence from

Human-level hardware timeline

We estimate that ‘human-level hardware’— hardware able to perform as many computations per second as a human brain, at a similar cost to a human brain—has a 30% chance of having already occurred, a 45%

Chance date bias

There is modest evidence that people consistently forecast events later when asked the probability that the event occurs by a certain year, rather than the year in which a certain probability of the event will

GoCAS talk on AI Impacts findings

By Katja Grace, 27 November 2017 Here is a video summary of some highlights from AI Impacts research over the past years, from the GoCAS Existential Risk workshop in Göteborg in September. Thanks to the folks there

Price performance Moore’s Law seems slow

By Katja Grace, 26 November 2017 When people make predictions about AI, they often assume that computing hardware will carry on getting cheaper for the foreseeable future, at about the same rate that it usually

2017 trend in the cost of computing

The cheapest hardware prices (for single precision FLOPS/$) appear to be falling by around an order of magnitude every 10-16 years. This rate is slower than the trend of FLOPS/$ observed over the past quarter century,

Price-performance trend in top supercomputers

A top supercomputer can perform a GFLOP for around $3, in 2017. The price of performance in top supercomputers continues to fall, as of 2016. Details TOP500.org maintains a list of top supercomputers and their