Originally released May 2023. What if we told you that within 15 years, it’s likely that we’ll see a 1,000x improvement in AI capabilities in a single year? And what if we then told you that those improvements would lead to explosive economic growth unlike anything humanity has seen before?

This is a prediction based on real economic models created by today’s guest Tom Davidson, Senior Research Analyst at Open Philanthropy. By the end of the episode, you’ll either be able to point out specific flaws in his stepbystep reasoning, or have to at least consider the idea that the world is about to get — at a minimum — incredibly weird. Host Luisa Rodriguez gets Tom to walk us through his careful reports on the topic, and how he came up with these numbers, across a terrifying but fascinating three hours.

In this episode:
• Luisa's intro [00:00:00]
• How we might go from GPT4 to disaster [00:13:50]
• Explosive economic growth [00:24:15]
• Are there any limits for AI scientists? [00:33:17]
• This seems really crazy [00:44:16]
• How is this going to go for humanity? [00:50:49]
• Why AI won’t go the way of nuclear power [01:00:13]
• Can we definitely not come up with an international treaty? [01:05:24]
• How quickly we should expect AI to “take off” [01:08:41]
• Tom’s report on AI takeoff speeds [01:22:28]
• How quickly will we go from 20% to 100% of tasks being automated by AI systems? [01:28:34]
• What percent of cognitive tasks AI can currently perform [01:34:27]
• Compute [01:39:48]
• Using effective compute to predict AI takeoff speeds [01:48:01]
• How quickly effective compute might increase [02:00:59]
• How quickly chips and algorithms might improve [02:12:31]
• How to check whether large AI models have dangerous capabilities [02:21:22]
• Reasons AI takeoff might take longer [02:28:39]
• Why AI takeoff might be very fast [02:31:52]
• Fast AI takeoff speeds probably means shorter AI timelines [02:34:44]
• Going from humanlevel AI to superhuman AI [02:41:34]
• Going from AGI to AI deployment [02:46:59]
• Were these arguments ever farfetched to Tom? [02:49:54]
• What ants can teach us about AI [02:52:45]



The 80,000 Hours Podcast features unusually indepth conversations about the world’s most pressing problems and what you can do to solve them.

Learn more, read the summary and find the full transcript on the 80,000 Hours website:
https://80000hours.org/podcast/episod...