#250 – Toby Ord on where AGI timelines go wrong

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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 capability Consuming point estimates and discarding the error bars Dismissing dissenting experts…