Is AI About to “Eat Everything”? | AI Reality Check
5/14/202632 min
Cal Newport takes a critical look at recent AI News. Video from today’s episode: youtube.com/calnewportmedia (0:00) Is AI about to “eat everything”? (2:53) What does the METR chart measure? (8:08) What do these measurements actually capture? (12:31-) How are the models getting better? (21:26) Does this mean AI is about to “eat everything”? (26:16) So, what’s with all of these hysterical tweets? Links: Buy Cal’s latest book, “Slow Productivity” at www.calnewport.com/slow https://metr.org/time-horizons/ https://x.com/SydSteyerhart/status/2053082873847070911 https://x.com/AISafetyMemes/status/2053169358919328172 https://x.com/ramez/status/2041946766598402459?s=61 Thanks to Jesse Miller for production and mastering, Nate Mechler for research and newsletter, and Jay Kerstens for theme music. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript preview
First 90 secondsCal Newport· Host0:00
Last week, the AI Safety and Evaluation Organization, METR, that's M-E-T-R, released a new update on their famous AI time horizon chart. Look, I'm gonna load it on the screen here for people who are watching. And when you zoom in, you can see these points on this chart starting around twenty twenty-five begin to go up, and then when we get to twenty twenty-six, they go way up, and then in the last update, go way up again. Now, this graph looks scary. Even if you don't know what it means, it does create a strong sense of digital ick. And as you can imagine, the Internet jumped into action to try to amplify that uneasy feeling. Now, in a recent essay posted to his newsletter, Gary Marcus did a good job of rounding up some of the more, uh, shall we say, concerned responses to this latest update to METR's latest graph. Let me show you a couple here. Uh, here's one, a tweet that said, "AI power is doubling every one hundred and three days now. It's going to eat everything. Nothing will be spared. We are on the threshold of truly ergodic alien intelligences in which human input will be nothing but a liability." All right, here's, uh, another example that Gary pointed out. The tweet simply says, "Tick tock." It has a, uh, expertly drawn graph that shows highest intelligence on Earth