Dwarkesh

He's thought about this for years.

Probably at some point, he heard a couple of Indian words and a couple of European words at the same time, and they kind of connected and the light bulb came on.

So this isn't about...

having all the information in your memory, so much as the normal process of discovery, which is kind of mysterious, but seems to come from just kind of having good heuristics and throwing them at things until you kind of get a lucky strike.

My guess is if we had really good AI agents and we...

applied them to this task it would look something like a scaffold where it's like think of every combination of words that you know of compare them if they sound very similar write it on this scratch pad here if there's a combination if a lot of words of the same type show up on this scratch pad that's pretty strange do some kind of thinking around it

And I just don't think we've even tried that.

And I think right now if we tried it, we would run into the combinatorial explosion.

We would need better heuristics.

Humans have such good heuristics that probably most of the things that show up even in our conscious mind rather than happening on the level of some kind of unconscious processing are at least the kind of things that could be true.

Like I think you could think of this as like a chess engine.

You have...

some unbelievable number of possible next moves, you have some heuristics for picking out which of those are going to be the right ones, and then gradually you kind of have the chess engine think about it, go through it, come up with a better or worse move, then at some point you potentially become better than humans.

I think if you were to force the AI to do this in a reasonable way, or you were to train the AI such that it itself could come up with the plan of going through this in some kind of heuristic-laden way, you could potentially equal humans.

I think it might be useful to think of our timelines as being like 2070, 2100.

It's just that the last 50 to 70 years of that all happened during the year 2027 to 2028 because we are going through this intelligence explosion.

Like I think if I asked you, could we solve this problem by the year 2100, you would say, oh yeah, by 2100, absolutely.

And we're just saying that the year 2100 might happen earlier than you expect because we have this research progress multiplier.

This has been my experience working with the team.

As I point out like five different things, are you sure you're taking this into account?