Confronting Impossible Futures

The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the assumpt

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We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents “join the workforce” and materially change the output of companies. We continue to believe that iteratively putting great tools in the hands of people leads to great, broadly-distributed outcomes.

We are begi... See more

That is why I suggest that people and organizations keep an “impossibility list” - things that their experiments have shown that AI can definitely not do today but which it can almost do. For example, no AI can create a satisfying puzzle or mystery for you to solve, but they are getting closer. When AI models are updated, test them on your impossib... See more

The strong version of Goodhart's law underlies most of my personal fears around AI (expect a future blog post about my AI fears!). If there is one thing AI will enable, it is greater efficiency, on almost all tasks, over a very short time period. We are going to need to simultaneously deal with massive numbers of diverse unwanted side effects,

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Integrating AI into our workflows has created a "meta-optimization problem." When everyone suddenly gets 10x more powerful, the hard part isn't doing things—deciding what's worth doing in the first place.