How seriously should governments take the threat of existential risk from AI, given the lack of consensus among researchers? On the one hand, existential risks (x-risks) are necessarily somewhat speculative: by the time there is concrete evidence, it may be too late. On the other hand, governments must prioritize — after all, they don’t worry too much about x-risk from alien invasions. MLST is sponsored by Brave: The Brave Search API covers over 20 billion webpages, built from scratch without Big Tech biases or the recent extortionate price hikes on search API access. Perfect for AI model training and retrieval augmentated generation. Try it now - get 2,000 free queries monthly at brave.com/api. Sayash Kapoor is a computer science Ph.D. candidate at Princeton University's Center for Information Technology Policy. His research focuses on the societal impact of AI. Kapoor has previously worked on AI in both industry and academia, with experience at Facebook, Columbia University, and EPFL Switzerland. He is a recipient of a best paper award at ACM FAccT and an impact recognition award at ACM CSCW. Notably, Kapoor was included in TIME's inaugural list of the 100 most influential people in AI. Sayash Kapoor https://x.com/sayashk https://www.cs.princeton.edu/~sayashk/ Arvind Narayanan (other half of the AI Snake Oil duo) https://x.com/random_walker AI existential risk probabilities are too unreliable to inform policy https://www.aisnakeoil.com/p/ai-existential-risk-probabilities Pre-order AI Snake Oil Book https://amzn.to/4fq2HGb AI Snake Oil blog https://www.aisnakeoil.com/ AI Agents That Matter https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.01502 Shortcut learning in deep neural networks https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Shortcut-learning-in-deep-neural-networks-Geirhos-Jacobsen/1b04936c2599e59b120f743fbb30df2eed3fd782 77% Of Employees Report AI Has Increased Workloads And Hampered Productivity, Study Finds https://www.forbes.com/sites/bryanrobinson/2024/07/23/employees-report-ai-increased-workload/ TOC: 00:00:00 Intro 00:01:57 How seriously should we take Xrisk threat? 00:02:55 Risk too unrealiable to inform policy 00:10:20 Overinflated risks 00:12:05 Perils of utility maximisation 00:13:55 Scaling vs airplane speeds 00:17:31 Shift to smaller models? 00:19:08 Commercial LLM ecosystem 00:22:10 Synthetic data 00:24:09 Is AI complexifying our jobs? 00:25:50 Does ChatGPT make us dumber or smarter? 00:26:55 Are AI Agents overhyped? 00:28:12 Simple vs complex baselines 00:30:00 Cost tradeoff in agent design 00:32:30 Model eval vs downastream perf 00:36:49 Shortcuts in metrics 00:40:09 Standardisation of agent evals 00:41:21 Humans in the loop 00:43:54 Levels of agent generality 00:47:25 ARC challenge