Have a sneer percolating in your system but not enough time/energy to make a whole post about it? Go forth and be mid - welcome to the Stubsack, your first port of call for learning fresh Awful you’ll near-instantly regret.
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If your sneer seems higher quality than you thought, feel free to cut’n’paste it into its own post — there’s no quota for posting and the bar really isn’t that high.
The post Xitter web has spawned so many “esoteric” right wing freaks, but there’s no appropriate sneer-space for them. I’m talking redscare-ish, reality challenged “culture critics” who write about everything but understand nothing. I’m talking about reply-guys who make the same 6 tweets about the same 3 subjects. They’re inescapable at this point, yet I don’t see them mocked (as much as they should be)
Like, there was one dude a while back who insisted that women couldn’t be surgeons because they didn’t believe in the moon or in stars? I think each and every one of these guys is uniquely fucked up and if I can’t escape them, I would love to sneer at them.
(Credit and/or blame to David Gerard. Also celebrating my birthday on Friday)
Well it took longer than I expected, but the AI 2027 guys finally posted a second update
their updated model website
This table is essentially the TLDR
They also finally explained the “2025 was 75% of AI 2027’s progress” thing and it seems like that number was mostly skewed by revenue (edit: valuation) numbers
For some reason their website lists the date of ASI as 12/2028 even though their actual graph only had a 32% chance tops of ASI happening on that date
<edited> Didnt I hear them say a while back that its not even revenue numbers? That its valuation of the companies being taken as proxy of value produced.
I find myself caring so little what these people think about anything
That is even worse than using the ARRs, which Ed Zitron has extensively explained are wildly distorted numbers done by shuffling sales and costs around to get really good 30-day to 1-month stretches.
I believe that was mentioned here
Here’s that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the “Economic Value” numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this… the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). “Coding Time Horizon” is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don’t have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren’t, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
“AI Software R&D Uplift” is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement… and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
According to one of the writers apparently 17% is supposed to be ‘progress is 17% slower than expected’, so the 34% figure here implies progress is 34% slower than expected, so that’s actually worse
That wouldn’t make sense, because 1.07 would mean progress is negative. I think they meant it as a multiplier? So 1.07 is almost exactly what the predicted, .17 is only 17% of what they expected.
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter, because so much of the input numbers to these calcs are garbage.
Yeah that’s what tripped me up, because if that was true then it’d make no sense why the percent of progress went up while the uplfit number went down.