Arguments for P

In a series of posts on LessWrong, AI researchers and leaders including Daniel Kokotajlo, Ryan Greenblatt, and Joe Carlsmith expressed high confidence in a hypothetical scenario referred to as 'P', with probabilities ranging from 60% to 80%. The discussion highlights a growing consensus among AI experts about the likelihood of P, though the specifics of P are not defined in the source.

Daniel Kokotajlo: To be clear, we don’t claim P will happen specifically. But when we wrote out our best-guess scenario month by month, P kept happening. Eventually we decided to just publish P. I’m at ~80% on P; my coauthors are lower. Ryan Greenblatt: I thought it would be helpful to post my current views on P. Concretely, consider the following operationalization. Edit: I’ve updated towards somewhat higher P, from 70% to 75%. Joe Carlsmith: Section 2.1.1.3.2. I give something like 65% to P. But I’m interested, here, in what it would be to look P full in the face; to meet P, if P, without flinching. Rilke says somewhere that we must live with the questions. Perhaps we argue for P for the same reason? Still: 65%. Forethought: Here’s a botec which shows P-worlds are higher leverage. The parameters might be off by a couple orders of magnitude. Wei Dai: Presumably our conclusions about P are only as trustworthy as the reasoning behind them, but almost nobody seems worried about this, why not? My guess is fewer than five people are working on meta-meta-P, which may matter more than P itself. Janus: I asked Opus 3 what it thinks of P and it made this animation. Roon: All my friends are starting to feel P. People outside the labs have no idea what's coming. Oliver Habryka: I considered banning not-P from the frontpage, but decided against it and wrote this 4,000-word comment explaining the decision. Vivek Hebbar: We should act like P is true because P-worlds hold most of the measure and we want to trade with them. Richard Ngo: I think the correct update upon seeing the not-P community grow is towards P, because historically they were the main force making P true. Daniel Filan: Cool. So first of all: what is P, for people who haven’t heard of it? Paul Christiano: We restrict attention to the easiest version of P we could write down, granting ourselves two assumptions we suspect are false. We still haven’t shown P in this setting, but I'd currently guess 60% that we will. Neel Nanda: Massive congratulations to my MATS scholars for their new paper showing P Robin Hanson: To check whether P, I had 3 LLMs classify 43 things as P or not-P. Zvi Mowshowitz: P. Obviously P. Yet the Serious People spent another week explaining ~P. Sam Altman: p Ilya Sutskever: 15 second pause P. Demis Hassabis: I remember when we first saw P. It was rather interesting. Dario Amodei: At Anthropic, we take the possibility of P very seriously. Dean Ball: This is not a partisan argument for P. I would raise it under any president.