Princeton CS professor Arvind Narayanan pushes back on Scale AI CEO Alex Wang's assertion that AI has the potential to be a bigger weapon than nuclear arms.
Prediction Open · timeframe Aug 2034
Narayanan: AI model scaling cycles are ending
“We're not gonna have too many more cycles, possibly zero more cycles, of a model that's almost an order of magnitude bigger in terms of the number of parameters than what came before, and thereby more powerful.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narayanan: Skeptical GPT-5 will yield a leap comparable to GPT-4
“Are we going to see a GPT-V that's as big a leap over GPT-V as GPT-V was over GPT-V? I'm frankly skeptical.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narayanan: Recursive AI scaling using synthetic data will not work
“And the other way to look at synthetic data is, okay, you take one trillion tokens, you train a model on it, and then you output 10 trillion tokens, so you get to the next bigger model, and then you use that to output a hundred trillion tokens. You know, I'll …”
Opinion
Narayanan: GPT-4 passing bar and medical exams meant nothing for actual practice
“So when GPT-IV came out and OpenAI claimed that it passed the bar exam and the medical licensing exam people were very excited slash scared about what this means for doctors and lawyers, and the answer turned out to be approximately nothing, right? Because it'…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Narayanan: AI bots influencing elections with misinformation is not a real danger
“So people have been worried, for instance, about bots creating misinformation with AI and influence in elections and that sort of thing. We're very, very skeptical that that's going to be a real danger.”
Prediction Held up
Narayanan: Restricting global access to AI models will fail
“Even if one country decides that models should be closed, the odds of getting every country to enact that kind of, ah, ah, rule are, you know, just vanishingly small. So if our approach to safety with AI is going to be premised on ensuring that quote unquote b…”