Tom Davidson joins the podcast to discuss how AI could quickly automate most cognitive tasks, including AI research, and why this would be risky.

Timestamps:

00:00 The current pace of AI

03:58 Near-term risks from AI

09:34 Historical analogies to AI

13:58 AI benchmarks VS economic impact

18:30 AI takeoff speed and bottlenecks

31:09 Tom's model of AI takeoff speed

36:21 How AI could automate AI research

41:49 Bottlenecks to AI automating AI hardware

46:15 How much of AI research is automated now?

48:26 From 20% to 100% automation

53:24 AI takeoff in 3 years

1:09:15 Economic impacts of fast AI takeoff

1:12:51 Bottlenecks slowing AI takeoff

1:20:06 Does the market predict a fast AI takeoff?

1:25:39 "Hard to avoid AGI by 2060"

1:27:22 Risks from AI over the next 20 years

1:31:43 AI progress without more compute

1:44:01 What if AI models fail safety evaluations?

1:45:33 Cybersecurity at AI companies

1:47:33 Will AI turn out well for humanity?

1:50:15 AI and board games