Currently 80% Success lags behind 50% Success by about ~10-12 months. I guess a key question is whether 50% going super-exponential will reduce this lag time, or whethet 80% will just go super-exponential in roughly the same way but ~10-12 months later.
Even if 50% Success is going super-exponential now, wouldn't you expect 80% Success to need to go exponential before full automation of AI R&D happens?
Wouldn't you need even better than 80% success rate for fully automation? As the time horizons get longer, its will take more and more time and effort for humans to review the output, so you can't hand off all the work to AI if it'll fail 20% of the time.
My median for 80% Success by end of 2026 was about 5 hours in January (and now may be more like 10 hours). Though my 90th percentile forecast is probably something like a couple days / not measured properly, so maybe this isn't actually a reason to think your 10% forecast for full automation of AI R&D is too high. Unless 95+% Success needs to get into the >24 hour range for full automation of AI R&D to be reached, in which case I do think there is a less than 10% chance of this by end of 2026, which would make 10% chance of full automation of AI R&D too high.
What if this is because the human 50% time horizon is between a few days and a month? Sure, mathematicians can work on something for years, but that is quite rare and does not happen 50% of the time. It is actually pretty hard to work on something for a month without good “scaffolding”, i.e. good plans or teamwork, which is really about breaking up the one project into sub-projects.
I suppose the hypothesis would be that good scaffolding, that decomposes tasks, enables an agent/team time horizon to increase, and this is the only way humans can complete bigger projects reliably.
But a much more capable agent than humans would not need such scaffolding.
Currently 80% Success lags behind 50% Success by about ~10-12 months. I guess a key question is whether 50% going super-exponential will reduce this lag time, or whethet 80% will just go super-exponential in roughly the same way but ~10-12 months later.
Even if 50% Success is going super-exponential now, wouldn't you expect 80% Success to need to go exponential before full automation of AI R&D happens?
Wouldn't you need even better than 80% success rate for fully automation? As the time horizons get longer, its will take more and more time and effort for humans to review the output, so you can't hand off all the work to AI if it'll fail 20% of the time.
My median for 80% Success by end of 2026 was about 5 hours in January (and now may be more like 10 hours). Though my 90th percentile forecast is probably something like a couple days / not measured properly, so maybe this isn't actually a reason to think your 10% forecast for full automation of AI R&D is too high. Unless 95+% Success needs to get into the >24 hour range for full automation of AI R&D to be reached, in which case I do think there is a less than 10% chance of this by end of 2026, which would make 10% chance of full automation of AI R&D too high.
What if this is because the human 50% time horizon is between a few days and a month? Sure, mathematicians can work on something for years, but that is quite rare and does not happen 50% of the time. It is actually pretty hard to work on something for a month without good “scaffolding”, i.e. good plans or teamwork, which is really about breaking up the one project into sub-projects.
I suppose the hypothesis would be that good scaffolding, that decomposes tasks, enables an agent/team time horizon to increase, and this is the only way humans can complete bigger projects reliably.
But a much more capable agent than humans would not need such scaffolding.
Everyone makes mistakes