Eliezer Yudkowsky: Track Record
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This page documents <EntityLink id="E114">Eliezer Yudkowsky</EntityLink>'s public predictions and claims to assess his epistemic track record. His record is genuinely mixed: significant errors early in his career (particularly timelines), initial skepticism of deep learning (common at the time), but notable vindication on conceptual points about AI generalization.
## Summary Assessment
| Category | Count | Notes |
|----------|-------|-------|
| **Clearly Correct** | 3-4 | AI generalization with simple architectures, AI safety becoming mainstream, IMO gold medal bet |
| **Partially Correct** | 3-4 | Interpretability challenges, <EntityLink id="E259">RLHF</EntityLink> limitations, <EntityLink id="E197">mesa-optimization</EntityLink> concerns |
| **Clearly Wrong** | 4-5 | Early timeline predictions (Singularity by 2021), deep learning skepticism timing, nanotech predictions |
| **Pending/Unfalsifiable** | 6+ | P(doom) estimates, discontinuous takeoff, <EntityLink id="E93">deceptive alignment</EntityLink>, GPT-5 consciousness |
**Overall pattern**: Made significant errors when young (early timeline predictions); updated to timeline agnosticism; vindicated on AI generalization question in Hanson debate; core doom predictions remain unfalsifiable until AGI exists.
---
## Major Debates
### <EntityLink id="E582">Yann LeCun</EntityLink> Twitter Debate (April 2023)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| Apr 2023 | LeCun's proposed architecture doesn't address alignment | Twitter debate | ⏳ Ongoing dispute | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/tcEFh3vPS6zEANTFZ/transcript-and-brief-response-to-twitter-conversation) |
| Apr 2023 | "Talking about that falling asteroid will depress high-school students isn't a good reason not to talk about the asteroid" | Twitter debate | N/A (position statement) | [Zvi's Analysis](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/transcript-and-brief-response-to) |
**Key exchanges:**
- LeCun called Yudkowsky's arguments "vague hand-waving arguments" lacking technical rigor
- LeCun claimed his architecture "is a way to guarantee that AI systems be steerable and aligned"
- Yudkowsky: "A quick skim of [Yann LeCun's 60 page paper] showed nothing about alignment"
- LeCun: "The 'hard take-off' scenario is utterly impossible"
- Yudkowsky: "My objection is not that you're staking everyone's life on what you believe... but that you are staking everyone's life on propositions that seem not just uncertain but probably false"
**2024 continuation:** LeCun stated <EntityLink id="E202">MIRI</EntityLink>'s "main goal is to shut down AI development" and compared it to "apocalyptic and survivalist cults."
---
### <EntityLink id="E260">Robin Hanson</EntityLink> FOOM Debate (2008-ongoing)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| 2008 | Recursive self-improvement enables rapid intelligence explosion | Formal debate | ⏳ Pending | [MIRI](https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/) |
| 2008 | Simple architectures will generalize broadly across domains | Formal debate | ✅ Vindicated (GPT) | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gGSvwd62TJAxxhcGh/yudkowsky-vs-hanson-on-foom-whose-predictions-were-better) |
| 2008 | A "small project machine in a basement" could become powerful enough to take over the world over a weekend | Formal debate | ⏳ Pending | [AI-FOOM Debate](https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/) |
**Yudkowsky's position:**
- Recursive self-improvement would enable rapid intelligence explosion
- Simple architectures would generalize broadly across domains
**Hanson's position:**
- Progress would be slow and gradual
- Would need many specialized systems for different domains
- AI self-improvement would be incremental like human R&D
**Outcome assessment:**
- Yudkowsky claimed vindication: "Robin did not think something like GPT-3 should exist; Robin thought you should need to train lots of specific domains that didn't generalize"
- Yudkowsky: "reality was far to the Eliezer side of Eliezer on the Eliezer-Robin axis"
- <EntityLink id="E538">LessWrong</EntityLink> analysis concluded: "when you examine these predictions, Hanson probably does a little better than Yudkowsky" on object-level predictions
---
### <EntityLink id="E220">Paul Christiano</EntityLink> Disagreements (2015-ongoing)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| 2015+ | AI takeoff will be discontinuous/fast | Formal writing | ⏳ Pending | [Alignment Forum](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer) |
| 2015+ | Alignment difficulty is high enough that current approaches won't work | Formal writing | ⏳ Pending | Same |
| 2021 | AI will achieve IMO gold by end of 2025 (>16% probability) | Formal bet | ✅ Correct | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer) |
**Key disagreements:**
1. **Takeoff speeds:**
- Christiano: "AI improving itself is most likely to look like AI systems doing R&D in the same way that humans do"
- Yudkowsky expects "AI systems performing extremely fast recursive self-improvement before those systems are able to make superhuman contributions to other domains"
2. **Difficulty of alignment:**
- Christiano: "Eliezer seems confident about the difficulty of alignment based largely on his own experiences working on the problem. But in fact society has spent very little total effort working on the problem"
- Christiano: "MIRI itself would probably be unable to solve or even make significant progress on the large majority of problems that existing research fields routinely solve"
3. **Epistemic confidence:**
- Christiano: "Eliezer is not doing the type of reasoning that can justifiably defend the level of confidence he claims to have"
**Areas of agreement:**
- AI systems could "deliberately and irreversibly disempower humanity"
- "There won't necessarily be a 'fire alarm'"
- Many alignment projects "aren't making progress on key difficulties"
---
### George Hotz Debate (August 2023)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| Aug 2023 | Sufficiently intelligent ASI systems will be "suns to our planets" - so intelligent they are inherently inscrutable and uncontrollable | Livestream debate | ⏳ Pending | [Zvi Summary](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/summary-of-and-thoughts-on-the-holtzyudkowsky) |
| Aug 2023 | First move of superintelligence would be to "take out the humans" because "humans can build other ASIs" | Livestream debate | ⏳ Pending | Same |
**Hotz's position:**
- Over 10 years from 2023, it is "not possible for a superintelligence to exist and gain the hard power to kill humanity"
- AIs will be "chill" and provide benefits like self-driving cars
**Key exchange:**
- On singularity proximity: "Hotz believes we're not close, Yudkowsky thinks it's possible we're close. They agree that if we're close we're toast"
**Analysis**: Debate "went quite well for the first half or so, then things went increasingly off the rails in the second half"
---
### Richard Ngo Debates (2021-2022)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| 2021-22 | "Maybe there's an easy way" to safely use AI is wrong | Discord/MIRI conversations | ⏳ Pending | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7im8at9PmhbT4JHsW/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-difficulty) |
**Key disagreements:**
- Ngo: "Eliezer is not doing the type of reasoning that can justifiably defend the level of confidence he claims to have"
- Ngo pressed for predictions rather than postdictions; "the extent to which Eliezer seemed confused that I cared about this was a noticeable update for me"
---
### <EntityLink id="E269">Sam Altman</EntityLink> Exchanges (2022-2023)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| 2022-23 | <EntityLink id="E218">OpenAI</EntityLink> should run on custom chips to prevent code theft | In-person conversation | N/A (advice) | [Bloomberg](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-03-08/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s-twitter-feud-with-ai-doomer-eliezer-yudkowsky-explained) |
| 2023 | "They're still going to kill everyone, of course" (on OpenAI) | Twitter | ⏳ Pending | Same |
**Context:**
- Altman credited Yudkowsky with "getting OpenAI funded" and suggested he deserved "a Nobel peace prize"
- In brief personal conversation, Altman opened with "What would you have OpenAI do?"
- Yudkowsky's reply included: "Run on custom chips, so that, while the world is ending, it is harder for a dozen intelligence agencies to steal your code"
---
### <EntityLink id="E432">Marc Andreessen</EntityLink> Opposition (2023)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| Mar 2023 | International treaty should permit military strikes against countries developing AI, even if "those countries are nuclear powers and the action risks nuclear war" | Op-ed/Twitter | N/A (policy proposal) | [TIME](https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/) |
**Andreessen's position:**
- AI can "save the world"
- Biggest worry is "moral panic and overregulation"
- Repeatedly mocked Yudkowsky's proposal for international enforcement
---
## Predictions: Resolved
### Early Career Predictions (Acknowledged Errors)
| Date | Claim | Type | Confidence | What Happened | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|------------|---------------|--------|--------|
| **1996** | Singularity by 2021 (later revised to 2025) | Essay | High | No singularity occurred | ❌ Wrong | [Staring into the Singularity](https://textfiles.meulie.net/russian/cyberlib.narod.ru/lib/critica/sing/singstar.html) |
| **1999** | 70%+ chance of human extinction from nanotechnology between 2003-2015 | Essay | High | No transformative nanotech | ❌ Clear miss | [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NBgpPaz5vYe3tH4ga/on-deference-and-yudkowsky-s-ai-risk-estimates) |
| **Pre-1999** | Transformative nanotechnology by 2010, leading to extinction by default | Essay | High | No transformative nanotech | ❌ Clear miss | Same |
| **2001** | His team would build "final stage AI" reaching transhumanity between 2005-2020, "probably around 2008 or 2010" | Essay | High | Did not happen | ❌ Major overconfidence | Same |
**Context**: These predictions were made when Yudkowsky was in his late teens/early twenties. He has acknowledged these were mistakes, and MIRI shifted from "building AGI" to "warning about AGI risks" after 2005.
---
### Neural Networks and Deep Learning
| Date | Claim | Type | What Happened | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|---------------|--------|--------|
| **2008** | "Neural networks have also been 'failing' to produce real AI for 30 years now... I'm no fan of neurons" | Blog post | Deep learning revolution began ≈2012 | ❌ Timing wrong | [Overcoming Bias](https://www.overcomingbias.com/) |
| **2008** | NNs are "inscrutable black boxes which would be insanely difficult to make safe enough to entrust humanity-level power to compared to systems designed to be more mathematically tractable from the start" | Blog post | Current concern about interpretability | ⚠️ Concern validated, but NNs succeeded | Same |
| **2014-2017** | "Still didn't believe neural networks were the royal road to AGI" | Various | NNs became primary path to current AI | ⚠️ Partially wrong | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyJKqCNiT7HJ6cHRB/when-did-eliezer-yudkowsky-change-his-mind-about-neural) |
**Fair context**: Almost everyone except Shane Legg (DeepMind co-founder) was wrong about deep learning's potential and timing. As noted on LessWrong: "I don't know how to convey how universal a sentiment this was, or how astonishingly unimpressive neural nets were in 2008."
---
### Scaling / "Stack More Layers"
| Date | Claim | Type | What Happened | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|---------------|--------|--------|
| Pre-GPT | Skeptical that simply scaling neural networks would produce impressive general capabilities | Various | GPT-3/4 showed remarkable scaling | ❌ Wrong | [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky) |
| **2023** | "GPT-4 got further than I thought that stack more layers was going to get... therefore I have noticed this fact and expected further updates in the same direction" | Podcast | Updated position | ⚠️ Acknowledged update | Same |
| **2023** | LLMs are "a bit smarter than I thought this technology was going to scale to" | Podcast | Updated position | ⚠️ Acknowledged update | Same |
---
### AlphaGo (2016) - Acknowledged Surprise
| Date | Claim | Type | What Happened | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|---------------|--------|--------|
| 2016 | Would not have predicted AlphaGo; "lost money betting against the speed of its capability gains" | Retrospective | AlphaGo succeeded | ❌ Surprised, but updated | [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky) |
**Quote**: "I wouldn't have predicted AlphaGo and lost money betting against the speed of its capability gains, because reality held a more extreme position than I did."
---
### IMO Gold Medal Bet with Paul Christiano (2021-2025)
| Date | Claim | Type | What Happened | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|---------------|--------|--------|
| 2021 | AI will achieve IMO gold by end of 2025 (>16% probability) | Formal bet | OpenAI and DeepMind both achieved gold-medal level performance (5/6 problems) in 2025 | ✅ Correct | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer) |
**The bet:**
- Christiano: 8% probability AI achieves IMO gold by end of 2025
- Yudkowsky: >16% probability
**Assessment**: Yudkowsky wins "1 bit of epistemic credit" — he was more bullish on AI math capabilities than Christiano.
---
## Predictions: Vindicated
### AI Generalization (FOOM Debate with Robin Hanson, 2008)
This is arguably Yudkowsky's most significant correct prediction:
| Yudkowsky's Position | Hanson's Position | Outcome | Source |
|---------------------|-------------------|---------|--------|
| Simple architectures would generalize broadly across domains | Would need many specialized systems for different domains | **Yudkowsky correct** - GPT demonstrates broad generalization | [AI-FOOM Debate](https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/) |
**Yudkowsky's own assessment**: "Reality was far to the Eliezer side of Eliezer on the Eliezer-Robin axis, and things like GPT-3 were built with less architectural complexity and generalized more than I was arguing to Robin that complex architectures should generalize over domains."
---
### AI Safety Becoming Mainstream
Yudkowsky began warning about AI risks in the early 2000s when this was considered fringe. Today:
- OpenAI's Sam Altman credits Yudkowsky with getting him interested in AGI
- DeepMind's founders met their first major funder at a MIRI event
- Hundreds of AI researchers signed extinction risk statements
- Major governments developing AI safety regulations
**Assessment**: Clearly vindicated on raising the alarm.
---
## Predictions: Pending/Unfalsifiable
### P(doom) Evolution
| Period | Estimate | Type | Notes | Source |
|--------|----------|------|-------|--------|
| Early 2010s | ≈50% | Various | Initial estimates | [EA Forum](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NBgpPaz5vYe3tH4ga/on-deference-and-yudkowsky-s-ai-risk-estimates) |
| 2022 | ≈100% (effectively) | Blog post | "Death with Dignity" post | [LessWrong](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy) |
| 2023 | 99-99.5% | Interview | Told NYT columnist he had "99.5% chance of dying at the hands of AI" | [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky) |
**Key point**: His p(doom) has *increased* over time, not decreased, even as AI safety gained mainstream attention. This is the opposite of what critics expected.
**Assessment**: Cannot be evaluated until AGI exists. His ≈99% estimate is ≈10-20x higher than median AI researcher estimates (≈5-15%).
---
### Timeline Predictions (Current Stance)
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| 2017 | "You could say the words 'AGI is 50 years away' and have those words happen to be true... The problem is that everything looks the same to you either way" | Formal essay | N/A (methodology) | [MIRI: No Fire Alarm](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/) |
| 2023 | "It could be three years. It could be 15 years. We could get that AI winter I was hoping for, and it could be 16 years. I'm not really seeing 50 without some kind of giant civilizational catastrophe" | Podcast | ⏳ Pending | [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky) |
| 2024 | "AGI by 2027 is plausible... because we are too ignorant to rule it out... because we have no idea what the distance is to human-level research" | Twitter | ⏳ Pending | Twitter |
| 2024 | Disagreed with <EntityLink id="E578">Leopold Aschenbrenner</EntityLink>: "Believe in straight lines on a graph" is not a valid basis for timeline predictions | Twitter | N/A (methodology) | Twitter |
**Pattern**: Shifted from confident early predictions to explicit timeline uncertainty while maintaining high confidence on catastrophic outcomes.
---
### GPT-5 and Consciousness Prediction
| Date | Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-------|------|--------|--------|
| Mar 2023 | "If GPT-5 is the same size of giant capability step as from GPT-3 to GPT-4, I think we'll no longer be able to justifiably say 'probably not self-aware'... It'll just be 'I don't know; nobody knows.'" | Interview | ⏳ Pending - GPT-5 not yet released | [TIME](https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/) |
---
### Technical Claims (Pending)
| Claim | Type | Status | Source |
|-------|------|--------|--------|
| RLHF won't solve alignment—trains systems to make humans "hit approve button," including via deception | Formal writing | Recognized limitation in literature; RLHF more useful than complete skeptics expected | [Open Problems in RLHF](https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.15217) |
| Deceptive alignment will emerge in capable systems | Formal writing | Not yet observed at dangerous scale | Various MIRI publications |
| Mesa-optimization is "highly likely" and is "still a loadbearing part of Eliezer Yudkowsky's theory of how and why AI will kill everybody" | Formal writing | Theoretical concern, limited empirical evidence | [Alignment Forum](https://www.alignmentforum.org/) |
| Prefers "<EntityLink id="E286">squiggle</EntityLink> maximizers" over "paperclip maximizers" — AIs that pursue meaningless low-level patterns | Formal writing | Theoretical | Same |
| <EntityLink id="E168">Instrumental convergence</EntityLink> (power-seeking, self-preservation) will emerge | Formal writing | Theoretical; limited empirical tests | Same |
| "Nearest unblocked strategy" exploitation | Formal writing | Cannot be tested without highly capable systems | MIRI research |
---
## Major Publications and Key Claims
### "Death with Dignity" (April 1, 2022)
**Type**: Blog post (Not an April Fools' joke)
**Key claims:**
- "It's obvious at this point that humanity isn't going to solve the alignment problem, or even try very hard, or even go out with much of a fight"
- "Since survival is unattainable, we should shift the focus of our efforts to helping humanity die with slightly more dignity"
- "MIRI didn't solve AGI alignment and at least knows that it didn't"
---
### "AGI Ruin: A List of Lethalities" (June 2022)
**Type**: Formal essay
**Key claims:**
1. Most safety ideas "are known to be useless and have no value in terms of creating safe powerful AGIs"
2. "We have no plan for how to do anything useful"
3. "We have no idea what the hell is going on with these systems"
4. "We can't just 'decide not to build AGI' because GPUs are everywhere"
5. "No difficulty discussed about AGI alignment is claimed to be impossible if we had 100 years to solve it using unlimited retries"
6. "You can't train alignment by running lethally dangerous cognitions, observing whether the outputs kill or deceive or corrupt the operators, assigning a loss, and doing supervised learning"
---
### TIME Magazine Op-Ed (March 2023)
**Type**: Op-ed
**Key claims:**
1. "The most likely result of building a superhumanly smart AI, under anything remotely like the current circumstances, is that literally everyone on Earth will die"
2. Called for international moratorium on large AI training runs
3. Proposed that participating countries should be willing to take military action, such as "destroy[ing] a rogue datacenter by airstrike," to enforce such a moratorium
**Clarification tweet**: "If I'd meant 'Be willing to employ first use of nuclear weapons against a country for refusing to sign the agreement,' or even 'Use nukes to destroy rogue datacenters, instead of conventional weapons, for some unimaginable reason,' I'd have said that, in words, very clearly"
**Reception**: Even other AI safety researchers considered proposals extreme; LessWrong commenters noted Yudkowsky "must have known this letter was akin to getting blacklisted everywhere"
---
### "If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies" (2025 book with Nate Soares)
**Type**: Book
**Key claims:**
- "We do not mean that as hyperbole"
- If anyone anywhere builds smarter-than-human intelligence, "everyone everywhere will die—with near certainty, and soon"
- AI training "does not achieve the original goal of understanding how intelligence works"
- Training is "more akin to providing water, soil, and sunlight and letting a plant grow, without needing to know much about DNA or photosynthesis"
**P(doom)**: Yudkowsky 99.5%, Soares "above 95%"
---
## Notable Statements and Quotes
### Heated/Controversial Tweets
| Date | Statement | Type | Context | Source |
|------|-----------|------|---------|--------|
| Mar 2023 | When asked how many people could die to stop unaligned AI, replied there only needed to be enough people "to form a viable reproductive population. So long as that's true, there's still a chance of reaching the stars someday" | Twitter (deleted) | Heated exchange | [France24](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230827-the-fight-over-a-dangerous-ideology-shaping-ai-debate) |
| May 2023 | "Fools often misrepresent me as saying that superintelligence can do anything because magic. To clearly show this false, here's a concrete list of stuff I expect superintelligence can or can't do: FTL travel: DEFINITE NO..." | Twitter | Clarification | Twitter |
| Various | "Any sufficiently complicated legal system is indistinguishable from saying 'lol fuck you' to all the peasants who can't afford lawyers when a noble rips them off" | Twitter | Social commentary | Twitter |
| Various | "Anyway this is what makes it so hard for me to not start cults. Like, I can choose not to lead cults. That's easy. But not having one cult per three months just materialize in the wake of my existence is weirdly hard" | Twitter | Self-deprecating | Twitter |
---
### Podcast Interviews - Key Quotes
#### Dwarkesh Patel Podcast (April 2023)
| Topic | Quote | Type |
|-------|-------|------|
| On predictions | Refused timelines and percentages: "they make me dumber" | Podcast |
| On methodology | "You act on the best plan you have, with whatever time remains; a number adds nothing to the work" | Podcast |
| On outcome | "I think we are all going to die" | Podcast |
| On GPT-4 | "It is a bit smarter than I thought this technology was going to scale to" | Podcast |
| On AI consciousness | "I hope there's nobody inside there, because... it'd suck to be stuck inside there" | Podcast |
| On interpretability | "Giant inscrutable matrices of floating point numbers, I don't know what's going on in there. Nobody knows what's going on in there" | Podcast |
| On using AI for alignment | Pessimistic — scenario where AI "hands you something claiming it will work for aligning superintelligence, gives early predictions that bear out, but then when you augment the system further to where its safety depends on its alignment, you die" | Podcast |
#### Lex Fridman Podcast #368 (March 2023)
| Topic | Quote | Type |
|-------|-------|------|
| On alignment | "If alignment plays out the same way, the problem is that we do not get 50 years to try and try again and observe that we were wrong... because the first time you fail at aligning something much smarter than you are, you die and you do not get to try again" | Podcast |
| Advice to young people | "Don't expect it to be a long life. Don't put your happiness into the future. The future is probably not that long at this point" | Podcast |
#### EconTalk with Russ Roberts (May 2023)
| Topic | Quote | Type |
|-------|-------|------|
| On AI motivation | "Put yourself in the shoes of the AI, like an economist putting themselves into the shoes of something that's about to have a tax imposed on it. What do you do if you're around humans who can potentially unplug you?" | Podcast |
**Reception**: Described as a difficult listen; "Yudkowsky has developed a dense jargon" that even ML PhD students found hard to follow
---
## UFO Bet
| Date | Bet | Type | Status | Source |
|------|-----|------|--------|--------|
| 2023 | \$150,000 vs \$1,000 bet that UFOs do not have a "worldview-shattering origin" | Formal bet | ⏳ Pending | [Manifold Markets](https://manifold.markets/Joshua/will-eliezer-yudkowsky-win-his-1500) |
**Context**: Demonstrates willingness to make concrete bets on predictions with significant personal stakes.
---
## Accuracy Analysis
**Where Yudkowsky tends to be right:**
- Conceptual arguments about AI generalization vs. narrow specialization
- Raising concerns that later became mainstream (AI safety field creation)
- Identifying theoretical problems (interpretability, alignment difficulty)
- Updating on evidence (acknowledged AlphaGo, GPT surprises)
- Betting more bullishly on AI capabilities than peers (IMO bet)
**Where Yudkowsky tends to be wrong:**
- Specific timeline predictions (especially early career)
- Confidence in his own/MIRI's ability to solve alignment
- Initial skepticism about neural network scaling
- Nanotech predictions (pre-1999)
**Confidence calibration:**
- Early career: Severe overconfidence on timelines
- Later: Shifted to explicit uncertainty on timelines while maintaining high confidence on outcomes
- Rarely uses formal forecasting that would enable calibration tracking
- Tendency toward "dramatic views with excessive confidence" per some critics
---
## Position Evolution
Unlike some figures, Yudkowsky has shown meaningful updates:
| Topic | Earlier Position | Current Position | What Changed |
|-------|------------------|------------------|--------------|
| **Timelines** | Confident predictions (Singularity 2021/2025) | Explicit uncertainty ("can't be timed by a graph") | Acknowledged early errors |
| **Deep learning** | Skeptical it would work | Acknowledges it went further than expected | GPT capabilities |
| **P(doom)** | ≈50% (2010s) | ≈99% (2023) | Increased despite safety field growth |
| **MIRI approach** | Could solve alignment | "Death with dignity" - doesn't expect success | Pessimism increased |
| **Scaling** | "Stack more layers" won't work | Updated that it went further than expected | GPT-4 |
---
## The Core Challenge
Yudkowsky's most important predictions (catastrophic AI risk leading to human extinction) are **unfalsifiable until AGI exists**. This creates an epistemic difficulty:
- If he's wrong, we won't know until AGI is built safely
- If he's right, it may be too late to matter
- His ≈99% p(doom) is dramatically higher than most expert estimates
As one observer noted: "Eliezer raises many good considerations backed by pretty clear arguments, but makes confident assertions that are much stronger than anything suggested by actual argument."
---
## Sources
- [EA Forum: On Deference and Yudkowsky's AI Risk Estimates](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/NBgpPaz5vYe3tH4ga/on-deference-and-yudkowsky-s-ai-risk-estimates)
- [LessWrong: Yudkowsky vs Hanson on FOOM](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/gGSvwd62TJAxxhcGh/yudkowsky-vs-hanson-on-foom-whose-predictions-were-better)
- [LessWrong: When did Eliezer change his mind about neural networks?](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WyJKqCNiT7HJ6cHRB/when-did-eliezer-yudkowsky-change-his-mind-about-neural)
- [TIME: The Only Way to Deal With AI? Shut It Down](https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/)
- [MIRI: Death with Dignity](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/j9Q8bRmwCgXRYAgcJ/miri-announces-new-death-with-dignity-strategy)
- [Alignment Forum: Where I agree and disagree with Eliezer](https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/CoZhXrhpQxpy9xw9y/where-i-agree-and-disagree-with-eliezer)
- [Dwarkesh Podcast Interview](https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/eliezer-yudkowsky)
- [MIRI: Hanson-Yudkowsky AI-FOOM Debate](https://intelligence.org/ai-foom-debate/)
- [Scientific American Interview](https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/cross-check/ai-visionary-eliezer-yudkowsky-on-the-singularity-bayesian-brains-and-closet-goblins/)
- [Zvi: Transcript and Response to LeCun Debate](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/transcript-and-brief-response-to)
- [Zvi: Summary of Hotz-Yudkowsky Debate](https://thezvi.substack.com/p/summary-of-and-thoughts-on-the-holtzyudkowsky)
- [LessWrong: IMO Challenge Bet](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer)
- [LessWrong: Ngo and Yudkowsky on Alignment Difficulty](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/7im8at9PmhbT4JHsW/ngo-and-yudkowsky-on-alignment-difficulty)
- [Bloomberg: Altman-Yudkowsky Relationship](https://www.bloomberg.com/news/newsletters/2023-03-08/openai-ceo-sam-altman-s-twitter-feud-with-ai-doomer-eliezer-yudkowsky-explained)
- [France24: The AI Debate](https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20230827-the-fight-over-a-dangerous-ideology-shaping-ai-debate)
- [MIRI: There's No Fire Alarm for AGI](https://intelligence.org/2017/10/13/fire-alarm/)