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

TsviBT 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 [...] ---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--- First published: July 15th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/5tqFT3bcTekvico4d/do-confident-short-timelines-make-sense --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article: