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Notes -
I think that likening the rationalists treatment of AI to the anti-finasteride crowd is a bit unfair to the former.
Now, AI has been a theme with rationalists from the very beginning. It would not be totally unfair to say that our prophet wrote the sequences (e.g. A Human's Guide to Words) as an instrumental goal to be able to discuss AI without getting bogged down in pointless definitional arguments. That was almost two decades ago, in the depth of the AI winter.
Scott Alexander wrote about GPT when it was still GPT-2, it was the first time I heard about it. It is fair to say that AI is the favorite topic on LessWrong, with Zvi minutely tracking the progress with the same dedication previously allocated to COVID. Generally, the rationalists are bullish on capabilities and bearish on alignment. But I feel that Eliezer's "dying with dignity strategy" haha-only-serious April's fool is overconfident in a way which is not typical of LW. In practical terms, it does not matter much if you think that p(ASI) is 0.15 and p(doom) is 0.1 or if you think they are 0.95 and 0.9 respectively.
We do not have a comprehensive theory of intelligence. We have noticed the skulls of the once who have predicted that AI would never beat a chess master, succeed at go, write a readable text, create a painting which most people can not distinguish from a human work of art and so on. This does not mean that AI will reach every relevant goalpost, reverse stupidity is not intelligence, after all.
We are in the situation where we observe a rocket launch without the benefits of any knowledge of rocketry or physics. Some people claimed the rocket would never reach an altitude of more than twice its own length, and they were very much proven wrong. Others are claiming that it would never reach 1km, and they were likewise proven wrong. From this, we can not conclude that it will obviously accelerate until it reaches Andromeda, nor can we conclude that it will not reach Andromeda.
Wrt the AI 2027, the vibes I remember getting from browsing through it is that it mostly Simulacrum level two, and came across as the least honest things which Scott ever co-authored. The whole national security angle is very much not what keeps LW up at night -- if China builds aligned ASI, they have a whole light cone to settle. What will happen to the US will just be a minor footnote in history. But the authors recognized that their target audience -- policymakers in DC -- will likely be alienated by their real arguments about x-risk. By contrast, national security is a topic which has been on the mind of the DC crowd for a century, so natsec was recruited as an argument-as-a-soldier.
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