TL;DR

I believe that:

Almost all LLM-centric safety research will not provide any significant safety value with regards to existential or civilisation-scale risks.
The capabilities-related forecasts (not the safety-related forecasts) of Stephen Brynes' Foom and Doom articles are correct, except that they are too conservative with regards to timelines.
There exists a parallel track of AI research which has been largely ignored by the AI safety community. This agenda aims to implement human-like online learning in ML models, and it is now close to maturity. Keywords: Hierarchical Reasoning Model, Energy-based Model, Test time training.
Within 6 months this line of research will produce a small natural-language capable model that will perform at the level of a model like GPT-3, but with improved persistence and effectively no "context limit" since it is constantly learning and updating weights.
Further development of this research will produce models that fulfill most of [...]

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Outline:

(00:11) TL;DR

(01:22) Overview

(04:10) The Agenda I am Worried About

(07:36) Concrete Predictions

(09:29) What I think we should do

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First published:
July 31st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tEZa7PouYatK78bbb/i-am-worried-about-near-term-non-llm-ai-developments

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“I am worried about near-term non-LLM AI developments” by testingthewaters

LessWrong (30+ Karma)