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Research problems

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

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Continuity of progress

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

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AI Timelines

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

AI Timelines

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,

AI Inputs

Progress in general purpose factoring

The largest number factored to date grew by about 4.5 decimal digits per year over the past roughly half-century. Between 1988, when we first have good records, and 2009, when the largest number to date was factored, progress was

AI Timelines

Conversation with Tom Griffiths

Participants Professor Tom Griffiths, ­ Director of the Computational Cognitive Science Lab and the Institute of Cognitive and Brain Sciences at the University of California, Berkeley. Finan Adamson, ­ AI Impacts. Note: These notes were