“Reframing Superintelligence” + LLMs + 4 years — AI Alignment Forum
In January 2019, FHI published Reframing Superintelligence,[1] a book-length technical report on prospects for advanced AI. OpenAI published the first paper on GPT-2 a month later. Advances since then have been strange and rapid, and I’d like to revisit the report in light of what we have learned. In brief, I think that the abstract conceptual model of AI development and organization proposed in Reframing fits today’s reality quite well, even though LLM-based technologies have diverged far from anything I’d anticipated. Below, you'll find an abstract of the abstract of the report, followed by a series of section-level mini-summaries[2] with update comments. I’ve omitted sections that are either outside the intended focus of this article or are too broad and forward-looking to summarize. A significant impetus behind “Reframing Superintelligence” was to challenge a prevailing notion of advanced AI (equating superintelligent-level AI with a superintelligent agent), which has, in my view,