Google DeepMind VP of Research Oriol Vinyals references historical AGI timeline predictions by DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Vinyals predicts pre-training compute will drop to ~50% as RL expands
“So to me, that balance feels correct, like some on pre-training, and here we, we're trying to learn every task. So certainly that's going to be, you know, let's say it can be as high as 50%, not as high as over 90 like today. And then the rest mostly on reinfo…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Vinyals: Emergent self-correction will make model bootstrapping trivial in specific domains
“At some point, the model might have the capability, let's say, to self-correct. Let's call it self-correction. And as soon as it hits that capability, you can see how, wow, bootstrapping now is trivial. And of course, it's not going to be that blanket across a…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Vinyals: AI will remain hybrid as general models overtaking science is far away
“Probably we can, and we might see more and more bootstrapping from Gemini and these models to then a specific solution that, that the model is going to be throw away, except for, you know, maybe cracking protein folding or, you know, figuring out nuclear fusio…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Vinyals: General reward functions in math will advance AI self-improvement
“Depending how you attack the problem, it's definitely not at that end. And I think even because it's so hard to have a perfect reward when you interleave language, I think by, even by accident, the field will move forward as we get to discover these more gener…”
Insight
Vinyals: Achieving monolithic AGI matters less than capability distribution
“The contrarian view would be, I'm not sure it matters that, that we achieved AGI. I think it might not look like Hey, like, it's gonna be exactly like the cognitive task we can do, and then we reach parity. It's gonna be a distribution of things that these mod…”
Prediction Held up
Vinyals: Context Windows Will Grow 10x for Commodity and SOTA AI in 1-2 Years
“I expect, I mean, order of one, two years, you might see, wow, we went another order of magnitude from both state of the art and, of course, what's considered a commodity. So I'm pretty certain about this.”