Scott Alexander

And then once you do achieve that milestone,

How much is your overall speedup?

And then what's it going to take to achieve the next milestone?

Combine that with the overall speedup, and that gets you your clock time distance until that happens.

And then, OK, now you're at that milestone.

What's your overall speedup, assuming that you have that milestone?

Also, what's the next one?

How long does it take to get to the next one?

So we sort of work through it bit by bit.

And at each stage, we're just making our best guesses.

So quantitatively, we were thinking something like 5x speedup to algorithmic progress from the superhuman coder.

And then something like a 25x speedup to algorithmic progress from the superhuman AI researcher, because at that point you've got the whole stack automated, which I think is substantially more useful than just automating the coding.

And then I think we, I forget what we say for a super intelligent AI researcher, but off the top of my head, it's probably something like,

in the hundreds or maybe like a thousand X overall speed up.

One of my favorite meme images is this graph showing world GDP over time.

You've probably seen it.

It spikes up.

And then there's like a little thought bubble at like the top of the spike in like 2010 or something.

And the thought bubble says like,

My life is pretty normal.