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The future of AI will be dumber than we can imagine
Recently Scott and some others put out this snazzy website showing their forecast of the future: https://ai-2027.com/
In essence, Scott and the others predict an AI race between 'OpenBrain' and 'Deepcent' where OpenAI stays about 3 months ahead of Deepseek up until superintelligence is achieved in mid-2027. The race dynamics mean they have a pivotal choice in late 2027 of whether to accelerate and obliterate humanity. Or they can do the right thing, slow down and make sure they're in control, then humanity enters a golden age.
It's all very much trad-AI alignment rhetoric, we've seen it all before. Decelerate or die. However, I note that one of the authors has an impressive track record, foreseeing roughly the innovations we've seen today back in 2021: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-looks-like
Back to AI-2027! Reading between the lines, the moral of the story is for the President to centralize all compute in a single project as quickly as he can. That's the easiest path to beat China! That's the only way China can keep up with the US in compute, they centralize first! In their narrative, OpenAI stays only a little ahead because there are other US companies who all have their own compute and are busy replicating OpenAI's secret tricks albeit 6 months behind.
I think there are a number of holes in the story, primarily where they explain away the human members of the Supreme AI Oversight Committee launching a coup to secure world hegemony. If you want to secure hegemony, this is the committee to be on - you'll ensure you're on it! The upper echelons of government and big tech are full of power-hungry people. They will fight tooth and nail to get into a position of power that makes even the intelligence apparatus drool with envy.
But surely the most gaping hole in the story is expecting rational, statesmanlike leadership from the US government. It's not just a Trump thing - gain of function research was still happening under Biden. While all the AI people worry about machines helping terrorists create bioweapons, the Experts are creating bioweapons with all the labs and grants given to them by leading universities, NGOs and governments. We aren't living in a mature, well-administrated society in the West generally, it's not just a US thing.
But under Trump the US government behaves in a chaotic, openly grasping way. The article came out just as Trump unleashed his tariffs on the world so the writers couldn't have predicted it. There are as yet unconfirmed reports people were insider-trading on tariff relief announcements. The silliness of the whole situation (blanket tariffs on every country save Belarus, Russia, North Korea and total trade war with China... then trade war on China with electronics excepted) is incredible.
I agree with the general premise of superintelligence by 2027. There were significant and noticeable improvements from Sonnet 3.5, 3.6 and 3.7 IMO. Supposedly new Gemini is even better. Progress isn't slowing down.
But do we really want superintelligence to be centralized by the most powerhungry figures of an unusually erratic administration in an innately dysfunctional government? Do we want no alternative to these people running the show? Superintelligence policy made by whoever can snag Trump's ear, whiplashing between extremes when dumb decisions are made and unmade? Or the never-Trump brigade deep in the institutions running their own AI policy behind the president's back, wars of cloak and dagger in the dark? OpenAI already had one corporate coup attempt, the danger is clear.
This is a recipe for the disempowerment of humanity. Absolute power corrupts absolutely and these people are already corrupted.
Instead of worrying 95% about the machine being misaligned and brushing off human misalignment in a few paragraphs, much more care needs to be focused on human misalignment. Decentralization is a virtue here. The most positive realistic scenario I can think of involves steady, gradual progression to superintelligence - widely distributed. Google, OpenAI, Grok and Deepseek might be ahead but not that far ahead of Qwen, Anthropic and Mistral (Meta looks NGMI at this point). A superintelligence achieved today could eat the world but by 2027, it would only be first among equals. Lesser AIs working for different people in alliances with countries could create an equilibrium where no single actor can monopolize the world. Even if OpenAI has the best AI, the others could form a coalition to stop them scaling too fast. And if Trump does something stupid then the damage is limited.
But this requires many strong competitors capable of mutual deterrence, not a single centralized operation with a huge lead. All we have to do is ensure that OpenAI doesn't get 40% of global AI compute or something huge like that. AI safety is myopic, obsessed solely with the dangers of race dynamics above all else. Besides the danger of decentralization, there's also the danger of losing the race. Who is to say that the US can afford to slow down with the Chinese breathing down their neck? They've done pretty well with the resources available to them and there's a lot more they could do - mobilizing vast highly educated populations to provide high-quality data for a start.
Eleizer Yudkowsky was credited by Altman for getting people interested in AGI and superintelligence, despite OpenAI and the AI race being the one thing he didn't want to happen. Really there needs to be more self-awareness in preventing this kind of massive self-own happening again. Urging the US to centralize AI (which happens in the 'good' timeline of AI-2027 and would ensure a comfortable lead and resolution of all danger if it happened earlier) is dangerous.
Edit: US secretary of education thinks AI is 'A1': https://x.com/JoshConstine/status/1910895176224215207
Yes. This is part of what I meant when I was talking about the utter failure of the Rationalist movement with @self_made_human recently. The Rats invested essentially 100% of their credibility in a single issue, trying to position themselves as experts in "safety", and not only do they come up with the most ridiculous scenario for risk, they ignore the most obvious ones, and even promote their acceleration!
This is blasphemy to the Rationalist. It's not even a question of whether the AI will be safe when decentralized or not, for them the whole point of achieving AGI is achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls.
It's strange, from the outside - even going back to their beginnings in the early 2010s, AI nonsense, and in general speculative technology, always seemed like one of Less Wrong's weakest points. It was that community at its least plausible, its least credible, and most moonbatty. Where people like Scott Alexander were most interesting and credible was in other fields - psychiatry in particular for him, as well as a lot of writing about society and politics.
So for that whole crowd to double down on their worst issue feels mostly just disappointing. Really, this is what you decided to invest in?
Is there a community that has out performed rationalists in forecasting AI? Scott's own 2018 forecast of AI in 2023 was pretty good, wasn't it??
I have roughly two thoughts here:
Firstly, I don't think that's a very substantial forecast. Those are very safe predictions largely amounting to "things in 2023 will be much the same as in 2018". The predictions he got correct were that a computer would beat a top player at Starcraft (AlphaStar did that in 2018), that MIRI would still exist in 2023 (not actually about AI), and about the 'subjective feelings' around AI risk (still not actually about AI). These are pretty weak tea. Would you rate him as correct or incorrect on self-driving cars? I believe there have been a couple of experimental schemes in very limited areas, but none that have been very successful. I would take his prediction to imply coverage of an entire city and for the cars to be useable by ordinary people not specially interested in tech.
Secondly, I feel like predictions like that are a kind of motte and bailey? Predicting that language models will get better over the next few years is a pretty easy call. "Technology will continue to incrementally improve" is a safe bet. However, that's not really the controversial issue. AI risk or AI safety has been heavily singularitarian in its outlook - we're talking about MIRI, née the Singularity Institute, aren't we? AGI, superintelligence, the intelligence explosion, and so on. It's a big leap from the claim that existing technologies will get better to, as Arjin put it, AGI "achieving total control of humanity's minds and souls".
Being right about autonomous driving technology gradually improving or text predictors getting a bit faster doesn't seem like it translates to reliability in forecasting AI-god.
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