How Do We Think About Progress in Machine Learning?

Jaime Sevilla is the Director of Epoch, a team of researchers investigating and forecasting the development of advanced AI. This is his second time on the podcast.

Over the next few episodes, we will be exploring the potential for catastrophe cause by advanced artificial intelligence. Why? First, you might think that AI is likely to become transformatively powerful within our lifetimes. Second, you might think that such transformative AI could result in catastrophe unless we’re very careful about how it gets implemented. This episode is about understanding the first of those two claims.

Fin spoke with Jaime about:

• We've seen a crazy amount of progress in AI capabilities in the last few months; even weeks. How should we think about that progress continuing into the future?
• How has the amount of compute used to train AI models been changing over time? What about algorithmic efficiency?
• Will data soon become a bottleneck in training state-of-the-art text models?

Further reading is available on our website: hearthisidea.com/episodes/sevilla

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