front – AI Impacts

Precedents for economic n-year doubling before 4n-year doubling

Does the economy ever double without having first doubled four times slower? Yes, but not since 3000BC.

Resolutions of mathematical conjectures over time

The time-to-proof for past mathematical problems currently remembered as notable is exponentially distributed with a half life of around 100 years.

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

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: Details GPUs (graphics processing units) are specialized electronic circuits originally

Effect of Eli Whitney’s cotton gin on historic trends in cotton ginning

We estimate that Eli Whitney’s cotton gin represented a 10 to 25 year discontinuity in pounds of cotton ginned per person per day, in 1793. Two innovations in 1747 and 1788 look like discontinuities of

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

Discontinuous progress investigation

Published Feb 2, 2015; last substantially updated April 12 2020 We have collected cases of discontinuous technological progress to inform our understanding of whether artificial intelligence performance is likely to undergo such a discontinuity. This page