“Updates from Comments on ‘AI 2027 is a Bet Against Amdahl’s Law’” by snewman

AI 2027 is a Bet Against Amdahl's Law was my attempt to summarize and analyze "the key load-bearing arguments AI 2027 presents for short timelines". There were a lot of great comments – every time I post on LW is a learning experience. In this post, I'm going to summarize the comments and present some resulting updates to my previous analysis. I'm also using this post to address some comments that I didn't respond to in the original post, because the comment tree was becoming quite sprawling.

TL;DR: my previous post reflected a few misunderstandings of the AI 2027 model, in particular in how to interpret "superhuman AI researcher". Intuitively, I still have trouble accepting the very high speedup factors contemplated in the model, but this could be a failure of my intuition, and I don't have strong evidence to present. New cruxes:

1. The rate of progress from [...]

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Outline:

(01:27) Confusion Regarding Milestone Definitions

(05:23) Someone Should Flesh Out What Goes Into AI R&D

(09:35) How Long Will it Take To Reach the Early Milestones?

(13:16) Broad Progress on Real-World Tasks Is a Crux

(15:50) Does Hofstadters Law Apply?

(19:46) What Would Be the Impact of an SAR / SIAR?

(22:05) Conclusions

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:

May 2nd, 2025

Source:

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FFKnWk2MGJmyQWEsd/updates-from-comments-on-ai-2027-is-a-bet-against-amdahl-s

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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