AI Impacts

Trends in DRAM price per gigabyte

The price of a gigabyte of DRAM has fallen by about a factor of ten every 5 years from 1957 to 2020. Since 2010, the price has fallen much more slowly, at a rate that

Discontinuous progress in history: an update

Katja Grace April 2020
We’ve been looking for historic cases of discontinuously fast technological progress, to help with reasoning about the likelihood and consequences of abrupt progress in AI capabilities. We recently finished expanding this investigation to 37 technological trends. This blog post is a quick update on our findings. See the main page on the research and its outgoing links for more details.

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…

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. (…)

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

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

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

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

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: Contents DetailsTheoretical peak performanceMetricsPrice metricsFLOPS performance metricsPrecision tradeoffsRelease date pricesGPU

Cortés, Pizarro, and Afonso as precedents for takeover

Daniel Kokotajlo, 29 February 2020 Epistemic status: I am not a historian, nor have I investigated these case studies in detail. I admit I am still uncertain about how the conquistadors were able to colonize