by Nicholas Carlini 2024-11-25

The field of AI [a] As usual, "AI" is a terrible word. Here I'm using it again as a standin for something like "machine learning" / "computers that try to solve tasks humans can" / whatever you want to pick as your definition. is progressing much faster than many expected. When things are changing so fast, it can be hard to remember what you thought was impossible just a few years ago, and conversely, what you thought was obviously going to be trivially solved that still hasn't been.

At the same time, many people I speak with have very confident opinions about the future of AI. But if you had asked them where AI was going to be 5 years ago, they would have been (a) equally confident, and (b) completely wrong.

People who have these confident opinions are also usually rather vague in their assertions. They'll say "AIs can never reason", but not "An AI system will never beat a human at Go"---because the latter can be refuted. Or they'll say "AIs will be as smart as PhDs", but not "An AI system will be able to pass the PhD qualifying exam at Berkeley"---because the latter can be refuted.

Fortunately, there's solution to both of these situations. You can (encourage others to) make refutable, calibrated predictions about what you (or they) think AI systems [b] Throughout these questions I will use the phrase "AI System" to refer to a hypothetical artificial intelligence system that can do anything it wants---as long as it doesn't receive human input. Current Large Language Models (LLMs) would count, as would LLMs that also have access to the internet, or can run programs, can access a calcualtor, can write code and evaluate it, etc. will and won't be able to do in a few years time. Most importantly, calibrated means you should assign confidence to your beliefs, so that if you're wrong you can see if you were confidently wrong, or just were guessing.

So here's a way to do that. I've put together a list of about 30 questions about the future of AI, and I'd like you to answer them. Half of the questions are yes/no, and I want you to assign a probability that you think each will happen. The other half ask you to pick a low/high range, you should pick a range so that you are 90% sure the answer will fall in that range. You can answer as many or as few as you like. And then once a year, I'll email you to remind you what you said, and how your predictions have held up. I'll also give you a permanent link to your answers so that you can share them with others. (By default your answers will be anonymous unless you choose otherwise.)