If your goal is to actually identify breakthrough technologies even slightly ahead of the curve, then I don't think it's helpful to apply base rates, for this exact reason. You will always predict “no”, you will be right 95+% of the time, and you will miss every transformative technology until it's too obvious to ignore.
If your goal is to actually identify breakthrough technologies even slightly ahead of the curve, then I don't think it's helpful to apply base rates, for this exact reason. You will always predict “no”, you will be right 95+% of the time, and you will miss every transformative technology until it's too obvious to ignore.
I think AI is on a strong trajectory to be extremely useful, but I'm not sure I would take this bet. “Passing exams” is not an economically useful function (except to students who want to cheat?) and it's not clear to me that AI will be engineered or optimized for this. If you picked something with a clear economic value, like generating marketing copy or writing scripts for TV and movies, I would be much more likely to take the bet.
If you interpret 'apply a 95% negative base rate' as 'just say no to all transformative techs', then of course you're right. But that's not really how one should apply a base rate. You just use Bayes rule, and allow the negative base rate to pre-weight your odds that a given tech will be transformative appropriately low.
Good point, but if you're really seriously doing that then I don't see how you could dismiss everything that AI has just become capable of in the last couple of years. That is an extremely strong trajectory towards some very fundamental capabilities—far more than enough to overcome 19:1 odds.
This boils down to what we mean by transformative, at least in my view. I mean, my personal evaluation is that AI is 90+% likely to be very useful as a tool in many fields by 2030. It's FAR less likely to replace entire fields. I'm not clear exactly what Bryan is estimating here.
This seems like the correct interpretation to me. In any event, ChatGPT (or a similar tech) purportedly has passed assorted medical exams and bar exams. So I don't know what insight is gained by this bet. You can make a test arbitrarily difficult, such that ChatGPT or its future descendants can't pass it, but what does that prove other than arbitrary difficulty?
If your goal is to actually identify breakthrough technologies even slightly ahead of the curve, then I don't think it's helpful to apply base rates, for this exact reason. You will always predict “no”, you will be right 95+% of the time, and you will miss every transformative technology until it's too obvious to ignore.
I think AI is on a strong trajectory to be extremely useful, but I'm not sure I would take this bet. “Passing exams” is not an economically useful function (except to students who want to cheat?) and it's not clear to me that AI will be engineered or optimized for this. If you picked something with a clear economic value, like generating marketing copy or writing scripts for TV and movies, I would be much more likely to take the bet.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/heuristics-that-almost-always-work
If you interpret 'apply a 95% negative base rate' as 'just say no to all transformative techs', then of course you're right. But that's not really how one should apply a base rate. You just use Bayes rule, and allow the negative base rate to pre-weight your odds that a given tech will be transformative appropriately low.
Good point, but if you're really seriously doing that then I don't see how you could dismiss everything that AI has just become capable of in the last couple of years. That is an extremely strong trajectory towards some very fundamental capabilities—far more than enough to overcome 19:1 odds.
This boils down to what we mean by transformative, at least in my view. I mean, my personal evaluation is that AI is 90+% likely to be very useful as a tool in many fields by 2030. It's FAR less likely to replace entire fields. I'm not clear exactly what Bryan is estimating here.
This seems like the correct interpretation to me. In any event, ChatGPT (or a similar tech) purportedly has passed assorted medical exams and bar exams. So I don't know what insight is gained by this bet. You can make a test arbitrarily difficult, such that ChatGPT or its future descendants can't pass it, but what does that prove other than arbitrary difficulty?
Since he expects his students to pass it, it can't be arbitrarily difficult.