Gwern Branwen - How an Anonymous Researcher Predicted AI's Trajectory
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Today, I'm interviewing Gorn Branwyn. Gorn is an anonymous Internet researcher and writer. He's deeply influenced the people who are building AGI. He was one of the first people to see LLM scaling coming. If you read his blog, you know he's one of the most interesting polymathic thinkers alive. We recorded this conversation in person. In order to protect Guern's anonymity, we created this avatar. This isn't his voice. This isn't his face, but these are his words. Guern, what is the most underrated benefit of anonymity?
I think the most underrated benefit of anonymity is that people don't project onto you as much. They they kind of can't, like, slot you into any particular niche or identity and, like, end up writing you off in advance. You know, everyone has to read you at least a little bit, to to even begin to dismiss you. It's great that people can't retaliate against you, and I've derived a lot of benefit from people not being able to, like, mail heroin to my home and call the police, to swap me. But but I always feel that the biggest benefit is just that you get a hearing at all, basically. Right. You yo
Do you expect companies to get automated top down starting with the CEO or from the bottom up starting with the
workers? All the pressures, I think, are to go bottom up. Mhmm. And from existing things, it's just much more palatable in every way to start at the bottom and replace there and then work your way up, to eventually kind of just having human executives overseeing a firm of AIs. And also from an RL perspective, I think if we are in fact better than AIs in some way, it should be in the long term vision thing. Right? Like, the AIs will be too myopic to execute any kind of novel long term strategy and seize new opportunities. So that would presumably give you this paradigm where you have, like, a h
What is the last thing that you think you personally will be doing before your last keystroke is automated?
The last thing that I see myself still doing right before the nanobots start eating me from the bottom up and I start screaming, no, I specifically requested the opposite of this, is I think right before that, I think what I'm still doing is the Steve Jobs kind of thing of choosing. Right? So my AI minions are, like, bringing me wonderful essays. And I'm saying this one is better. You know, this is the one that I like and possibly building on that and saying that that's almost right, but you you know what would make it really good if you pushed it to 11 in this way.
If you do have firms that are made up of AIs, what do you expect the unit of selection to be? Will it be individual models? Will it be the firm as a whole? I mean, with humans, we have these debates about whether it's kin level selection, individual level selection, gene level selection. What will it be for the AIs?
Yeah. I think once you can replicate individual models perfectly, the the unit of selection can move way up, and you can do much larger groups and packages of minds. That would be sort of an obvious place to start. You can train individual minds in a differentiable fashion, but then you can't really train the interaction between them. Right? So you you have groups of models or minds of of people who just work together really well in a global sense, even if you can't attribute it to any particular aspect of their interactions. There's some places you go and people just, like, work really well t
By when could one have foreseen the singularity? So obviously, Moravec and others are talking about it in the eighties nineties. But when was the earliest you could have
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