Ramez Naam
Author and clean-energy investor who has been publishing dated forecasts of solar, wind, battery and electric-vehicle costs since 2011, and publishing the corrections when they came in low.
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Our reading
Their wordsIt's clear to me that consciousness can exist in other substrates than humans, including in digital systems.
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Their wordsThat doesn't tell us that LLMs are conscious, though. They have very different architecture than human or animal brains. It's far from a slam dunk.
- 6 days earlier
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Their wordsA four-hour benchmark horizon is about 16 times longer than OpenAI’s research horizon. AI 2027’s 11-hour forecast is about 44 times longer. Of course, the tasks being performed by researchers at OpenAI aren’t the same as those in the METR benchmark. So we should expect some discrepancy. This, however, goes well beyond that. Actual AI research at OpenAI is an order of magnitude or more harder than metrics, benchmarks, or forecasts suggest.
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AGIAI alignmentrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsI do expect autonomous self-improvement to arrive at some point. I’m skeptical that it leads to Type 5 - runaway super-intelligence - without a major conceptual breakthrough.
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scaling lawsrecursive self-improvement
Their wordsGiven our best current data, the AI self-improvement loop would need to be roughly 5–10× stronger to sustain itself, let alone run away.
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsI can't rule out that there's some subjective experience happening in an LLM.
- 6 years earlier
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Their wordsIn short solar prices have dropped faster and lower than almost anyone has expected.
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Their wordsWe can use the last decade to predict the future prices of solar power. Not by looking at the cost of solar as a function of time, but by looking at the cost of solar as a function of cumulative scale of the solar industry.
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Their wordsThe data paint an incredible picture: One that shows the price of solar electricity from utility-scale systems dropping by anywhere from 30-40% with each doubling of cumulative solar deployment.
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Our reading
Demand for electricity will rise to absorb far more solar than is currently considered feasible.
Their wordsAdd these up, and it’s plausible that solar’s contribution to the energy system could double or triple the amount currently considered feasible for solar to provide.
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Their wordsThis incredible pace of solar cost decline, with average prices in sunny parts of the world down to a penny or two by 2030 or 2035, is just remarkable.