Nature of AI

Do neural networks learn human concepts?

This page is a stub. It does not necessarily represent much of what is known on the topic. Our understanding is that the degree to which neural networks learn concepts that are potentially understandable to

Blog

April files

Katja Grace April 2021

Internal drafts for feedback

Blog

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.

Blog

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

Continuity of progress

Historic trends in book production

The number of books produced in the previous hundred years, sampled every hundred or fifty years between 600AD to 1800AD contains five greater than 10-year discontinuities, four of them greater than 100 years. The last

Continuity of progress

Penicillin and historic syphilis trends

Penicillin did not precipitate a discontinuity of more than ten years in deaths from syphilis in the US. Nor were there other discontinuities in that trend between 1916 and 2015. The number of syphilis cases