Gwern Branwen

Mm-hmm.

It doesn't seem to – it doesn't have to be artificial intelligence necessarily.

It's taking the idea of non-human intelligence seriously and not imagining your classic sci-fi scenario of humans kind of like going out into the galaxy with ray guns, the sort of thing where you have rockets and ray guns but you don't have cell phones.

People complain that the singularity is a sort of like boring, overused sci-fi trope.

But if you went out and actually grabbed random books of science fiction that are out there, you would find that like less than 1% contain anything remotely like that, right?

Or have any kind of relevance to the current context that we actually face with AI.

I would say they overestimate it.

You know, they mistake for intelligence the fact that I remember many things, that I've written many things over the years.

They imagine that, you know, if they sat me down, that I could do it all spontaneously at the moment that they're meeting me or talking to me.

But many things that I've thought about, I think I have the advantage of having looked at before over a long time.

So I'm cheating.

You know, when I talk to people, I may just be quoting something that I've already written or at least thought a lot about.

So I think I come off as a lot smarter when you're reading me than I actually am.

I would say I'm not really all that smart compared to many people I've known who update very fast on the fly.

But in the end, it's the output that matters, right?

Yeah, it's not just crystallized intelligence, but I think that if you could see all the individual steps in my process, you'd be a lot less impressed.

If you could see all the times where I kind of just note down something, like, hmm, that's funny, or...

you know, huh, like another example of that pattern.

And if you just saw each particular step, I think you would say that the steps in isolation were very reasonable.

It's only when that happens over a decade and you don't see the individual stuff that my output at the end looks like magic.