I spent a couple of weeks writing this new introduction to AI timelines. Posting here in case useful to share and for feedback. The aim is to be up-to-date, more balanced than Situational Awareness, but still relatively accessible to new people.

In recent months, the CEOs of leading AI companies have grown increasingly confident about rapid progress:

OpenAI's Sam Altman: Shifted from saying in November “the rate of progress continues” to declaring in January “we are now confident we know how to build AGI”
Anthropic's Dario Amodei: Stated in January “I’m more confident than I’ve ever been that we’re close to powerful capabilities… in the next 2-3 years”
Google DeepMind's Demis Hassabis: Changed from “as soon as 10 years” in autumn to “probably three to five years away” by January.

What explains the shift? Is it just hype? Or could we really have Artificial General [...]

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Outline:

(04:12) In a nutshell

(05:54) I. What's driven recent AI progress? And will it continue?

(06:00) The deep learning era

(08:33) What's coming up

(09:35) 1. Scaling pretraining to create base models with basic intelligence

(09:42) Pretraining compute

(13:14) Algorithmic efficiency

(15:08) How much further can pretraining scale?

(16:58) 2. Post training of reasoning models with reinforcement learning