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• Path to Ascendance

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👣 2024-10-17: Path to Ascendance

Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei becomes the first large company CEO to illustrate what a good AGI future looks like, and it’s spellbinding.

TLDR: AGI 2026 earliest, how to get there, and what to do with it. Overall, the first honest public discussion of the internal company view of what may be a good outcome

I appreciate him putting this out there, as he will clearly be labelled crazy by a bunch of people. For the first time, there's a plausible narrative of how we get from here to there. I’ve heard this multiple times in private conversations, in parts, but its great to have an official view from someone actually building it.

What is AGI?

He states “Strong AI” (aka super intelligence/AGI) could arrive as early as 2026.

Given we are at the end of 2024 and an AI research to product cycle is roughly 18 months, this implies that several current research directions in the AI labs might actually bear fruit.

Definition of Strong AI

Country of geniuses in a datacenter:

• Smarter than a Nobel prize winner across many fields

• Has complete access to digital interfaces ie audio, video, search for both input and output. It can communicate and instruct humans

• It can autonomously plan and carry out tasks over long periods of time

• Does not have a physical embodiment but can control any robots its connected to

• The training resources can redeployed to run millions of its instances, and the model can absorb and generate information at 10x-100x human speed

• Each of these millions of instances can act independently, or can collaborate with other instances as necessary

It’s a society of minds, working together.

Note the accesses and capabilities the AGI has. The counterpoint to this is that an AGI that is constrained to not have interface access, limited to a box with no outputs, is not an AGI (one reason I have been going on and on about what a wonder ScarJo ChatGPT Voice is).

Demis/Eric Schmidt at Google have been talking about agents in production next year.

Noam Brown at OpenAI just started hiring for multi-agent co-ordination research. OpenAI just released their Swarm example framework for what a group of agents working closely would look like.

So all three labs are getting close to having autonomous single agents working, perhaps not at Nobel IQ levels, or able to co-ordinate well, but those things can be improved in parallel.

The middle ground between safety and capability

He then discards the fast takeoff (ie within an hour) Singularity scenario due to physical bottlenecks such as hardware and need to run experiments. It will take time to get stuff done.

Equally he discards the no-movement scenario, ie the intelligence is hamstrung by regulation and nothing happens.

Instead he picks a middle route: an intelligence at first limited by all kinds of walls, which it works to scale and overcome.

He then speculates how the AGI will affect 5 areas of human endeavor.

A. Biology

He acknowledges the limits ie experiments that take time to run in the physical world, regulations and intrinsic complexity. Notably Yudkowsky, the prophet of AI doom, has always refused to take this view of the real constraints that any takeoff scenario will face.

Dario emphasizes that he wants to use AI not as a data analysis tool, but a principal investigator that improves very aspect of what a biologist does (planning, purchasing, management etc).

Points out that most of progress in biology comes from big breakthroughs like CRISPR, and that we usually average 1 per year.

He expects AI to push this up 10x and maybe up to 1000x.

Does not see clinical trials as a hurdle. Trials take long because our drugs suck, and don’t usually provide clear indication of improvement. This will change if AI only produces the most efficacious drugs with improved measurement techniques of more accurate endpoints, where the FDA can stop the trial when the super efficacy of a drug means it it would be unethical not to provide it to the placebo group.

Expects advances in imaging, and AI models better able to predict the body’s reaction to drugs.

Expects 100 years of breakthroughs in 5-10 years such as:

• Reliable prevention and treatment of nearly all infectious diseases

• Eliminating most cancer

• Prevention and/or cure genetic disease, Alzheimer’s

• Biological freedom (choice of body type, gender, hair color, etc)

• Doubling human lifespan

He points out that this is on no policymakers roadmap, as it would increase the working age population and therefore make the whole Socials Security solvent for example.

Points out that most of our social infrastructure is completely unprepared to deal with this at all.

B. Neuroscience

He expects the same 100 years of breakthroughs in 5-10 years. Primarily coming from much better measurement techniques like optogenetics and neural probes, better digital models, and a similar ability to intervene both physically and behaviorally.

He expects:

• Most mental illnesses to be cured

• Psychopathy and other structural conditionals maybe amenable to “brain restructuring”

• Performance management of the brain, akin to coaching

• Neurological freedom, the ability to easily experience the peaks of human experience

• Mind uploading is not inside the 5-10 year window, so its a bit sci-fi for now (!)

C. Economy and Inequality

Admits he’s not an confident on this as he is on scientific advances.

Does not think AI will solve economic planning and will then lead to socialism (ie the perfect central planner).

He expects:

• Health advances to be widely distributed fairly rapidly in the developing world, and this alone to lead to rapid increases in GDP 10-20% per annum

• Advances in food security due to a second green revolution basically solving for abundance

• Climate change mitigations including replacing of factory farming with energy efficient lab meat

• Greater state organizational capacity to do things with AIs for execution

D. War and Peace and Justice

He has no certainty on how AI will affect this (which indicates greater confidence in the preceeding!).

He wants a Western block of democracies to secure the critical bottlenecks for AI and then dole out the benefits to other nations willing to play ball.

AI could be used to reduce bias in systems by having consistency in previously imprecise criteria like “cruel and unusual punishment”.

Crypto smart contracts were not smart enough to self adjudicate but AI contracts could be.

AI interpretability techniques could be used to examine and critique internal thought process of judicial decision making in order to improve it.

AI could be used to aggregate opinions and preferences amongst citizens to improve the performance of democratic governments.

AI could improve provision of government services such as the DMV.

E. Work and Meaning

He envisions a divorce of economic payments from use of labor. Want to spend a few years making a movie.. do so. Never mind that the AI can do it better, if you enjoy it, do it.

He does not know what humans will get paid for if the AI can do everything.

In the short term, if AI gets good at 90% of human tasks, the remaining 10% become the human economy and expand. This is in the first 5-10 years.

In the long term the AI will be able to do everything. His long term is a 10+ year timeline.

He envisions a societal transition but not sure what comes next, could imagine humanity living in the surface runoff of the deluge of the AI supereconomy.

In My Opinion

Probabilities

He sounds like he’s fairly confident of an earlier than 2029 timeline. In fact I would say he has a 30% probability of a 2026 emergence.

One should assume Dario is comfortable stating this in public because the cumulative five year probability is now in 80%> range, with 10 year probability in the 99% range (which is why he has a 5-10 year range that he provides as an afterthought)

This is high! And soon!

And unlike Kurzweil, who was super hand wavy and didn’t have a path to get there, Dario is actually building it.

Growth

This is the first time I’ve heard a company head state a GDP number, 20% per annum in developing countries, raising the rest of the world to US levels within 5-10 years.

Paul Christiano, formerly on OpenAI's model alignment team, had a 40% Dyson Sphere probability by 2040, with an implied GDP growth rate of 640% for the next 2 decades.

I can’t even imagine what Paul’s potential future looks like, so at least I can think about what Dario’s numbers are.

This would definitely feel like Accelerando to us I think.

The levels of growth in the US would be unprecedented. This country would MOVE. The further along you are on the tech curve, the more able you are to distribute new innovations. Just as 1 in 8 Americans take Ozempic or other GLP-1 drugs (versus 0% in rest of world), just as MRNA COVID vaccines were manufactured first by American firms, every single new innovation would be fast deployed here first.

Society

Lots of midlife and existential crisis ahead. What happens when a 70 year old feels like 35 mentally and physically? What happens when one can choose racial attributes or height or gender.

What happens when some of us embrace the future faster than the rest?

Overall

This make me much more optimistic about the sci-fi future in the next 5 years. We are going to make it.

Ending off with a modified waitbutwhy. Just to let you know exactly where we are:

Link to the original:

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