Import AI 405: What if the timelines are correct? | Import AI

This article is full of all sorts of interesting information from questions about LLM consciousness to security threats to LLM agents with the capability of doing months of work.

The paper is worth reading because it represents an earnest attempt by a thoughtful human to confront the impossibly large question we’ll need to deal with in the next decade or so – how conscious might LLMs be?

Individuals working with AI performed just as well as teams without AI, showing a 0.37 standard deviation improvement over the baseline. This suggests that AI effectively replicated the performance benefits of having a human teammate – one person with AI could match what previously required two-person collaboration.

“By automating complex tasks previously requiring human ingenuity and extensive effort, AI models can significantly lower the barriers to entry for malicious actors of all attack levels,” Google writes. “”Our evaluations revealed that current AI cyber evaluations often overlook critical areas. While much attention is given to AI-enabled vulnerability exploitation and novel exploit development, our analysis highlights AI’s significant potential in under-researched phases like evasion, detection avoidance, obfuscation, and persistence. Specifically, AI’s ability to enhance these stages presents a substantial, yet often underestimated, threat.”

Significant and sustained growth: “We find that the 50% time horizon has been growing exponentially from 2019–2024 on our tasks,” METR writes. The analysis means METR thinks there’s a high chance AI systems will be able to tackle tasks that take a human a month (167 working hours) by 2030 – or potentially earlier, if a recent uptick in the trajectory due to the arrival of new reasoning models holds.