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Back to AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement, with John Schulman & Beren Millidge.

Why Should AI Eventually Dominate Research?

Dwarkesh Patel says it would be weird if the climb since 2012, powered by huge amounts of compute scaling, never produced an AI that can dominate humans at least in research and development. Labs and many startups are already aiming simulations at getting better at AI research and at science in general, the direction Ryan Greenblatt described on an earlier episode. Chess is the picture of a smooth climb that still snaps. Elo for chess bots has risen in a very linear way since the 1980s, but the human range was a discontinuity, from experts always beating the bots to experts never beating them, while the Elo line kept rising. Economic impact has stayed limited because AI is still only slowly rising in Elo relative to humans.

Beren Millidge agrees the only way that domination fails is if skill flattens just before the human Elo crossing, and he judges the field already pretty close to it. A normal 2035 then requires that flatten to arrive first. He thinks dramatic regulation on AI is the more likely path to an ordinary 2035 than the technical flatten.

Grokipedia·Dwarkesh Patel

Transcript

AI researchers debate how close we are to recursive self-improvement ·

Dwarkesh Podcast

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