In this illuminating discussion, Benjamin Todd, a writer focused on AGI since 2014, breaks down the trends shaping the future of AI. He explores four key drivers of AI progress, including enhanced reasoning capabilities and the growing computational power fueling development. Todd contrasts the optimistic scenarios where AGI could emerge by 2030 and revolutionize industries like software and research with the challenges that might hinder such advancements. It's a thoughtful examination of the promising yet complex road ahead for artificial intelligence.
01:00:06
forum Ask episode
web_stories AI Snips
view_agenda Chapters
auto_awesome Transcript
info_circle Episode notes
insights INSIGHT
Four Key Drivers of AI Progress
Four main AI progress drivers: larger base models, reasoning training, longer thinking times, agent scaffolding.
These combined with growing compute and research investments drive rapid improvements until at least 2028.
insights INSIGHT
Scaling and Efficiency Boost AI
Scaling pre-training using vast compute improves base AI models significantly.
Algorithmic efficiency also improves model power; combined, these factors drive exponential performance gains.
insights INSIGHT
Reasoning Through Reinforcement
Reinforcement learning from human feedback teaches models to reason and produce useful outputs.
This approach enabled models to reach and surpass human expert level in scientific reasoning and coding tasks.
Get the Snipd Podcast app to discover more snips from this episode
More and more people have been saying that we might have AGI (artificial general intelligence) before 2030. Is that really plausible?
This article by Benjamin Todd looks into the cases for and against, and summarises the key things you need to know to understand the debate. You can see all the images and many footnotes in the original article on the 80,000 Hours website.
In a nutshell:
Four key factors are driving AI progress: larger base models, teaching models to reason, increasing models’ thinking time, and building agent scaffolding for multi-step tasks. These are underpinned by increasing computational power to run and train AI systems, as well as increasing human capital going into algorithmic research.
All of these drivers are set to continue until 2028 and perhaps until 2032.
This means we should expect major further gains in AI performance. We don’t know how large they’ll be, but extrapolating recent trends on benchmarks suggests we’ll reach systems with beyond-human performance in coding and scientific reasoning, and that can autonomously complete multi-week projects.
Whether we call these systems ’AGI’ or not, they could be sufficient to enable AI research itself, robotics, the technology industry, and scientific research to accelerate — leading to transformative impacts.
Alternatively, AI might fail to overcome issues with ill-defined, high-context work over long time horizons and remain a tool (even if much improved compared to today).
Increasing AI performance requires exponential growth in investment and the research workforce. At current rates, we will likely start to reach bottlenecks around 2030. Simplifying a bit, that means we’ll likely either reach AGI by around 2030 or see progress slow significantly. Hybrid scenarios are also possible, but the next five years seem especially crucial.
Chapters:
Introduction (00:00:00)
The case for AGI by 2030 (00:00:33)
The article in a nutshell (00:04:04)
Section 1: What's driven recent AI progress? (00:05:46)
How we got here: the deep learning era (00:05:52)
Where are we now: the four key drivers (00:07:45)
Driver 1: Scaling pretraining (00:08:57)
Algorithmic efficiency (00:12:14)
How much further can pretraining scale? (00:14:22)
Driver 2: Training the models to reason (00:16:15)
How far can scaling reasoning continue? (00:22:06)
Driver 3: Increasing how long models think (00:25:01)
Driver 4: Building better agents (00:28:00)
How far can agent improvements continue? (00:33:40)
Section 2: How good will AI become by 2030? (00:35:59)
Trend extrapolation of AI capabilities (00:37:42)
What jobs would these systems help with? (00:39:59)
Software engineering (00:40:50)
Scientific research (00:42:13)
AI research (00:43:21)
What's the case against this? (00:44:30)
Additional resources on the sceptical view (00:49:18)
When do the 'experts' expect AGI? (00:49:50)
Section 3: Why the next 5 years are crucial (00:51:06)
Bottlenecks around 2030 (00:52:10)
Two potential futures for AI (00:56:02)
Conclusion (00:58:05)
Thanks for listening (00:59:27)
Audio engineering: Dominic Armstrong Music: Ben Cordell
80,000 Hours Podcast 