#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong
Both Silicon Valley and the public can’t get enough of ‘AGI timelines.’ But Toby Ord, senior researcher at Oxford’s AI Governance Initiative and author of The Precipice, believes we consistently make big mistakes when thinking about them. He lays out the 14 ways he most often sees people go wrong:
Assuming AI research is just hill-climbing
Imagining AI research is just programming
Forecasting “could” instead of “will”
Believing the current benchmark is the last one
Extrapolating trends with no clear finish line
Assuming inputs keep scaling at the same rate
Conflating intelligence with…
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