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The "AI 2027" Scenario: How realistic is it?

Everyone’s been talking about it. JD Vance read it. What does it actually tell us?

A serious analysis would have tried to give some kind of probability to each of those longshots, such as solving reliability, inventing new forms of “neuralese recurrence” (see below), etc, not to mention very specific sets of political choices and a motivations by hypothetical future machines and the chance that humans would go down without a fight. Breakthroughs in “neuralese recurrence” (whatever that is) and memory (which real-world people have been working on for decades, with relatively little success) and “iterated distillation and amplification” comes straight from the kind of writing that gave us Star Trek’s “positronic brain”. The second issue is that by writing scenarios that trade so heavily on China-US conflict, they are feeding the worst fears of hawks, both in the US and China — escalating how much money and power both sides will give to companies racing as fast as possible, and reduce investments in efforts to mitigate the risks of building AI that we are scarcely able to control.

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