AI Article Readings
Beyond The Last Horizon - By Scott Alexander
Apr 24, 2025
Delve into the intricate world of AI forecasting and its limitations regarding time horizons. Discover how humans and AI differ in performance over time, with humans improving while AI tends to plateau. A striking graph reveals AI's success rate in task completion rising to 80%, with exciting acceleration projected between 2024 and 2025. Explore the contrasting planning approaches of AI and humans, while the potential for a transformative coding revolution from AI begs the question: when will superhuman coding capabilities arrive?
25:28
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Quick takeaways
- AI systems excel in short-duration tasks but struggle with long-term projects, reflecting a fundamental difference in capabilities compared to human intelligence.
- The rapid doubling of AI's task horizons every seven months suggests significant advancements in their capabilities, potentially allowing them to tackle complex tasks similar to humans by 2035.
Deep dives
Understanding Time Horizons
Time horizons are a crucial concept in forecasting the capabilities of AI systems, particularly regarding their ability to perform long-duration tasks. The discussion highlights that AI's performance improves for short tasks, but its struggle with longer tasks reflects a different kind of limitation than that seen in humans. For instance, while humans can benefit from extended durations to enhance performance on complex tasks, AIs often plateau in their capabilities as task durations increase. This fundamental difference suggests that AI training currently emphasizes short horizon tasks, leaving it less equipped to handle the long-term projects that human intelligence manages more adeptly.
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