Are Short AI Timelines Really Higher-Leverage? — LessWrong
This is a rough research note – we’re sharing it for feedback and to spark discussion. We’re less confident in its methods and conclusions. Different strategies make sense if timelines to AGI are short than if they are long. In deciding when to spend resources to make AI go better, we should consider both: We’ll call the second component "leverage." In this note, we'll focus on estimating the differences in leverage between different timeline scenarios and leave the question of their relative likelihood aside. People sometimes argue that very short timelines are higher leverage because: These are important points, but the argument misses some major countervailing considerations. Longer timelines: There's a third consideration we think has been neglected: the expected value of the future conditional on reducing AI takeover risk under different timeline scenarios. Two factors pull in opposite directions here: The overall upshot depends on which problems you’re working on and what resourc