The Slow Take Off Cliff

The face of Mt. Everest is gradual and continuous; for each point on the mountain, the points 1 mm away aren’t too much higher or lower. But you still wouldn’t want to ski down it.

I thought about this when reading What A Compute-Centric Framework Says About Takeoff Speeds, by Tom Davidson. Davidson tries to model what some people (including me) have previously called “slow AI takeoff”. He thinks this is a misnomer. Like skiing down the side of Mount Everest, progress in AI capabilities can be simultaneously gradual, continuous, fast, and terrifying. Specifically, he predicts it will take about three years to go from AIs that can do 20% of all human jobs (weighted by economic value) to AIs that can do 100%, with significantly superhuman AIs within a year after that.

As penance for my previous mistake, I’ll try to describe Davidson’s forecast in more depth.

https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/davidson-on-takeoff-speeds