Biological Anchors external review by Jennifer Lin (linkpost)

By peterhartree @ 2022-11-30T13:06 (+36)

This is a linkpost to https://docs.google.com/document/d/1_GqOrCo29qKly1z48-mR86IV7TUDfzaEXxD3lGFQ8Wk/edit

This report is one of the winners of the EA Criticism and Red Teaming Contest. 

Summary: This is a summary and critical review of Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors report on AI timelines. It provides an easy-to-understand overview of the main methodology of Cotra’s report. It then examines and challenges central assumptions of the modelling in Cotra’s report. First, the review looks at reasons why we might not expect 2022 architectures to scale to AGI. Second, it raises the point that we don’t know how to specify a space of algorithmic architectures that contains something that could scale to AGI and can be efficiently searched through (inability to specify this could undermine the ability to take the evolutionary anchors from the report as a bound on timelines).