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sneerclub·SneerClubbylurker

Checking in on AI 2027 a year later

Originally posted about in the stubsack but decided to make this its own post because what the hell, let’s see how everyone’s favourite scenario is doing!

There are two takes on it: the author’s own (their 2025 evaluation is here) and another one from this website called AI 2027 tracker (not run by the authors) pretty sure this one only evaluates the qualitative predictions and not the quantitive ones

Both of them show that we are behind AI 2027’s predicted pace. By the author estimate: 2025 was only at 58% and 2026 is 69% of progress. AI 2027 tracker shows a consistent decrease in accuracy over time (from 100% to 81% to 91% to 46%)

View original on awful.systems
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sneerclub·SneerClubbylurker

Eliezer’s response to being in the Epstein files

originally posted in the thread for sneers not worth a whole post, then I changed my mind and decided it is worth a whole post, cause it is pretty damn important

Posted on r/HPMOR roughly one day ago

full transcript:

Epstein asked to call during a fundraiser. My notes say that I tried to explain AI alignment principles and difficulty to him (presumably in the same way I always would) and that he did not seem to be getting it very much. Others at MIRI say (I do not remember myself / have not myself checked the records) that Epstein then offered MIRI $300K; which made it worth MIRI's while to figure out whether Epstein was an actual bad guy versus random witchhunted guy, and ask if there was a reasonable path to accepting his donations causing harm; and the upshot was that MIRI decided not to take donations from him. I think/recall that it did not seem worthwhile to do a whole diligence thing about this Epstein guy before we knew whether he was offering significant funding in the first place, and then he did, and then MIRI people looked further, and then (I am told) MIRI turned him down.

Epstein threw money at quite a lot of scientists and I expect a majority of them did not have a clue. It's not standard practice among nonprofits to run diligence on donors, and in fact I don't think it should be. Diligence is costly in executive attention, it is relatively rare that a major donor is using your acceptance of donations to get social cover for an island-based extortion operation, and this kind of scrutiny is more efficiently centralized by having professional law enforcement do it than by distributing it across thousands of nonprofits.

In 2009, MIRI (then SIAI) was a fiscal sponsor for an open-source project (that is, we extended our nonprofit status to the project, so they could accept donations on a tax-exempt basis, having determined ourselves that their purpose was a charitable one related to our mission) and they got $50K from Epstein. Nobody at SIAI noticed the name, and since it wasn't a donation aimed at SIAI itself, we did not run major-donor relations about it.

This reply has not been approved by MIRI / carefully fact-checked, it is just off the top of my own head.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HPMOR/s/c1O3FjR4QGOpen linkView original on awful.systems
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