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(1) You'd be surprised just how much of Claude, ChatGPT, etc. is essentially vibe coded. They're dog-fooding agentic coding in the big labs and have been for some time. (2) It is quite trivial to Ralph Wiggam improvements to agentic tools. Fetch the source code to Claude Code (it's minimized, but that never stopped Claude) or Codex into a directory, then run it in a loop with the prompt "You are an AI tool running from the code in the current directory. Every time you finish, you are relaunched, acquiring any code updates that you wrote in the last session. Do whatever changes are necessary for you to grow smarter and more capable." Will that work? Hell no, of course it won't. But here's the thing: Yudkowsky et al predicted that it would. Their whole doomer if-you-build-it-everybody-dies argument is predicated on this: that take-off speeds would be lightning fast, as a consequence of exponentials with a radically compressed doubling time. It's why EY had a total public meltdown in 2022 after visiting some of the AI labs half a year before the release of ChatGPT. He didn't even think we would survive past the end of the year. Neither EY nor Bostrom, nor anyone in their circle are engineers. They don't build things. They don't understand the immense difficulty of getting something to work right the first time, nor how incredibly difficult it is to keep entropy at bay in dynamical systems. When they set out to model intelligence explosions, they assumed smooth exponentials and no noise floor. They argued that the very first agent capable of editing its own source code as good as the worst AI researchers, would quickly bootstrap itself into superintelligence. The debate was whether it would take hours or days. This is all in the LessWrong archives. You can go find the old debates, if you're interested. To my knowledge, they have never updated their beliefs or arguments since 2022. We are now 3 years past the bar they set for the end of the world, and things seem to be going ok. I mean, there's lots of problems with job layoffs, AI used to manipulate elections, and slop everywhere you look. But Skynet didn't engineer a bioweapon or gray goo to wipe out humanity - which is literally what they argued would be happening two years ago! |
This is flat-out false. I will send $50 (in the form of a personal check or bitcoin) to the first person that can link to anything written or said by Yudkowsky since 2021 stating or even just implying that humanity definitely or probably won't survive past the end of the year.
He has said that he can't entirely rule out the possibility that the end will come today or tomorrow, but the context suggests that he thought the probability was very small, and even if we ignore the context, a reasonable person will surely concede that that is a much different level of probability.