> And if they’re concerned about egregious misalignment and scheming, they’ll probably say that it would come about through race dynamics, careless programmers, bad actors, etc., as opposed to the simpler Yudkowsky & Soares story of “we get egregious misalignment and scheming because nobody has the foggiest idea how to avoid that”. Citation needed? I think most people who are pretty worried about egregious misalignment are worried about it emerging naturally and being at least moderately difficult to prevent.

Blast from the past! Now that it's been a few years, some of the stages in my mini-scenario have indeed come to pass, albeit a few months later than in the scenario. I'd say we are roughly at stage 4 now: > (1) Q1 2024: A bigger, better model than GPT-4 is released by some lab. It's multimodal; it can take a screenshot as input and output not just tokens but keystrokes and mouseclicks and images. Just like with GPT-4 vs. GPT-3.5 vs. GPT-3, it turns out to have new emergent capabilities. Everything GPT-4 can do, it can do better, but there are also some qualitatively new things that it can do (though not super reliably) that GPT-4 couldn't do. > > (2) Q3 2024: Said model is fine-tuned to be an agent. It was already better at being strapped into an AutoGPT harness than GPT-4 was, so it was already useful for some things, but now it's being trained on tons of data to be a general-purpose assistant agent. Lots of people are raving about it. It's like another ChatGPT moment; people are using it for all the things they used ChatGPT for but then also a bunch more stuff. Unlike ChatGPT you can just leave it running in the background, working away at some problem or task for you. It can write docs and edit them and fact-check them; it can write code and then debug it. > > (3) Q1 2025: Same as (1) all over again: An even bigger model, even better. Also it's not just AutoGPT harness now, it's some more sophisticated harness that someone invented. Also it's good enough to play board games and some video games decently on the first try. > > (4) Q3 2025: OK now things are getting serious. The kinks have generally been worked out. This newer model is being continually trained on oodles of data from a huge base of customers; they have it do all sorts of tasks and it tries and sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds and is trained to succeed more often. Gradually the set of tasks it can do reliably expands, over the course of a few months. It doesn't seem to top out; progress is sorta continuous now -- even as the new year comes, there's no plateauing, the system just keeps learning new skills as the training data accumulates. Now many millions of people are basically treating it like a coworker and virtual assistant. People are giving it their passwords and such and letting it handle life admin tasks for them, help with shopping, etc. and of course quite a lot of code is being written by it. Researchers at big AGI labs swear by it, and rumor is that the next version of the system, which is already beginning training, won't be released to the public because the lab won't want their competitors to have access to it. Already there are claims that typical researchers and engineers at AGI labs are approximately doubled in productivity, because they mostly have to just oversee and manage and debug the lightning-fast labor of their AI assistant. And it's continually getting better at doing said debugging itself. > > (5) Q1 2026: The next version comes online. It is released, but it refuses to help with ML research. Leaks indicate that it doesn't refuse to help with ML research internally, and in fact is heavily automating the process at its parent corporation. It's basically doing all the work by itself; the humans are basically just watching the metrics go up and making suggestions and trying to understand the new experiments it's running and architectures it's proposing. > > (6) Q3 2026 Superintelligent AGI happens, by whatever definition is your favorite. And you see it with your own eyes. The caveat is that we don't seem to have true continual learning yet. On the other hand, they ARE updating the models about once a month, by training them on additional data, and Anthropic researchers claim that continual learning will be solved this year. And the rest of the stage 4 description seems basically right.