“Do confident short timelines make sense?” by TsviBT, abramdemski

Tsvi's context

Some context:

My personal context is that I care about decreasing existential risk, and I think that the broad distribution of efforts put forward by X-deriskers fairly strongly overemphasizes plans that help if AGI is coming in <10 years, at the expense of plans that help if AGI takes longer. So I want to argue that AGI isn't extremely likely to come in <10 years.

I've argued against some intuitions behind AGI-soon in Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk.

Abram, IIUC, largely agrees with the picture painted in AI 2027: https://ai-2027.com/

Abram and I have discussed this occasionally, and recently recorded a video call. I messed up my recording, sorry--so the last third of the conversation is cut off, and the beginning is cut off. Here's a link to the first point at which [...]

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Outline:

(00:17) Tsvis context

(06:52) Background Context:

(08:13) A Naive Argument:

(08:33) Argument 1

(10:43) Why continued progress seems probable to me anyway:

(13:37) The Deductive Closure:

(14:32) The Inductive Closure:

(15:43) Fundamental Limits of LLMs?

(19:25) The Whack-A-Mole Argument

(23:15) Generalization, Size, & Training

(26:42) Creativity & Originariness

(32:07) Some responses

(33:15) Automating AGI research

(35:03) Whence confidence?

(36:35) Other points

(48:29) Timeline Split?

(52:48) Line Go Up?

(01:15:16) Some Responses

(01:15:27) Memers gonna meme

(01:15:44) Right paradigm? Wrong question.

(01:18:14) The timescale characters of bioevolutionary design vs. DL research

(01:20:33) AGI LP25

(01:21:31) come on people, its \[Current Paradigm\] and we still dont have AGI??

(01:23:19) Rapid disemhorsepowerment

(01:25:41) Miscellaneous responses

(01:28:55) Big and hard

(01:31:03) Intermission

(01:31:19) Remarks on gippity thinkity

(01:40:24) Assorted replies as I read:

(01:40:28) Paradigm

(01:41:33) Bio-evo vs DL

(01:42:18) AGI LP25

(01:46:30) Rapid disemhorsepowerment

(01:47:08) Miscellaneous

(01:48:42) Magenta Frontier

(01:54:16) Considered Reply

(01:54:38) Point of Departure

(02:00:25) Tsvis closing remarks

(02:04:16) Abrams Closing Thoughts

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First published:
July 15th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5tqFT3bcTekvico4d/do-confident-short-timelines-make-sense

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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