What are the strongest arguments for very short timelines? — LessWrong
Comment by elifland - Here's the structure of the argument that I am most compelled by (I call it the benchmarks + gaps argument), I'm uncertain about the details. 1. Focus on the endpoint of substantially speeding up AI R&D / automating research engineering. Let's define our timelines endpoint as something that ~5xs the rate of AI R&D algorithmic progress (compared to a counterfactual world with no post-2024 AIs). Then make an argument that ~fully automating research engineering (experiment implementation/monitoring) would do this, along with research taste of at least the 50th percentile AGI company researcher (experiment ideation/selection). 2. Focus on REBench since it's the most relevant benchmark. REBench is the most relevant benchmark here, for simplicity I'll focus on only this though for robustness more benchmarks should be considered. 3. Based on trend extrapolation and benchmark base rates, roughly 50% we'll saturate REBench by end of 2025. 4. Identify the most important gaps between saturating REBench and the endpoint defined in (1). The most important gaps between saturating REBench and achieving the 5xing AI R&D algorithmic progress are: (a) time horizon as measured by human time spent (b) tasks with worse feedback loops (c) tasks with large codebases (d) becoming significantly cheaper and/or faster than humans. There are some more but my best guess is that these 4 are the most important, should also take into account unknown gaps. 5. When forecasting the time to cross the gaps, it seems quite plausible that we get to the substantial AI R&D speedup within a few years after saturating REBench, so by end of 2028 (and significantly earlier doesn't seem crazy). 1. This is the most important part of the argument, and one that I have lots of uncertainty over. We have some data regarding the "crossing speed" of some of the gaps but the data are quite limited at the moment. So there are a lot of judgment calls needed and people with strong long timel