Its fine if he trusts the right experts.

And its not really hard to at least understand one point: We are putting the most amount of money ever into compute and the smartest people on the planet on one topic: AGI and we see progress every month.

If you don't take this serious, even if we hit a hard plateu very fast (not seeing one at all) you are ignorant as hell.

You don't go to bed without a worry in the world if you have a wildfire 20km away you can see. You would also not see it as a waste to be awake and aware and alert while seeing were it moves.

The timeline thing though, its ranges right? But if you hear about the same or similiar timelines across different independent people, they just might have seen things in frontierlabs you can't.

Btw. AI feels complelty different if you have a lot more tokens available to you than if you wait or constantly run into token limits or if you skip fable level because you can't /wont afford it.

Imagine sitting in Anthropic or OpenAI and having the best moodel doing all the work for you vs. sometimes playing with it a little bit.

This problem has permeated everywhere. Nobody can predict the future. Even VCs can’t and yet I’ll get a weekly email with a confident narrative about the future. Looking at a16z. CEOs do this as well. Listen to Satya talk about how AI will transform things. We’ve trained everyone else to casually state what the future will look like on timelines. As if it’s knowable at all.

In general you can't take anyone whose job is to opine too seriously. When you're not familiar with what they're talking about, they make it sound reasonable and convincing. It's their skill after all. But now and then they talk about some topic you understand and care deeply about, and realize they're just repeating the talking points some staffer prepared for them shortly before. Most recently it happened to me with John Oliver talking about housing, reading from the standard left-NIMBY bingo card. I like him as a comedian, still.

Is this unique to AI? I feel like something changed with social media becoming kinda ubiquitous. Like everyone suddenly felt the need to have an opinion on every thing. And on lots of divisive topics the fact you might not have an opinion could have you face criticism for not caring and/or being on the "other" side to whatever position your accuser/interrogator is.

I don't actually know what it is or when the phenomenon changed, but it definitely feels like people don't say "I don't know" or "I don't know enough to have an opinion on that" very much any more.