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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
If it turns out that our current approach to AI fizzles out at von-Neumann IQ levels, then all is good as historically, that is not sufficient intelligence to take over the world. In that case, it does not matter much who reaches the plateau first -- sure, it will be a large boon to their economy, but eventually AI will just become a commodity.
On the other hand, if AI is able to move much beyond human levels of intelligence (which is what the term "superintelligence" implies), then we are in trouble. The nightmare version is that there are unrealized algorithmic gains which let you squeeze out much more performance out of existing hardware. Someone tells an AI cluster to self-improve one evening, and by morning, that AI is to us as we are to ants.
In such a scenario, it is winner takes all. (Depending on how alignment turns out, the winner may or may not be the company running the AI.) The logical next step is to pull up the ladder which you just have climbed. Even if alignment turns out to be trivial, nobody wants to give North Korea a chance to build their own superintelligence. At the very least, you tell your ASI to backdoor all the other big AI clusters. It does not matter if they would have achieved the same result the next night, or if they were lagging a year behind.
(Of course, if ASI is powerful enough, it might not matter who wins the race. The vision the CCP has for our light cone might not all be that different from the vision Musk has. Does it matter if we spread to the galaxy in the name of Sam Altman or Kim Jong Un? More troublesome is the case where ASI makes existing militaries functionally obsolete, but does not solve scarcity.)
How valuable is intelligence?
One data point that I've been mulling over: humans. We currently have the capability to continue to scale up our brains and intelligence (we could likely double our brain size before running into biological and physical constraints). And the very reason we evolved intelligence in the first place was that it gave adaptive advantage to people who have more of it.
And yet larger brain size doesn't seem to be selected for in modern society. Our brains are smaller than our recent human ancestors' (~10% smaller). Intelligence and its correlates don't appear to positively affect fertility. There's now a reverse Flynn effect in some studies.
Of course, there are lots of potential reasons for this. Maybe the metabolic cost is too great; maybe our intelligence is "misaligned" with our reproductive goals; maybe we've self domesticated ourselves and overly intelligent people are more like cancer cells that need to be eliminated for the functioning of our emergent social organism.
But the point remains that winning a game of intelligence is not in itself something that leads to winning a war for resources. Other factors can and do take precedence.
This assumes that something like human level intelligence, give or take, is the best the universe can do. If super intelligence far exceeding human intelligence is realizable on hefty GPUs, I don't think we can draw any conclusions from the effects of marginal increases in human intelligence.
I've been pulling heads out of very stretched vaginas for the past week, and suspect there are biological reasons other than metabolism that larger head size is selected against.
This might go away if we got rid of the sexually antagonistic selection that's limiting larger hip sizes in women.
Human heads used to be bigger, though. And childbirth is much less likely to result in death now than before, thanks to human intelligence and the heroic efforts of professionals like yourself. And if increases in intelligence did offer a significant reproductive benefit, larger hips that enabled that intelligence would be selected for.
Bigger faces as adults, due to e.g. much larger jaws iirc. Don't think head size at birth was much different, was it?
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