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AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

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AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

Dwarkesh Podcast

2025/04/17
Dwarkesh Podcast

Dwarkesh Podcast

2025/04/17
OverviewShownoteHighlightsTranscriptChaptersPins

Shownote

Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (economy literally doubling every year or two). Thi...

Highlights

Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu, co-founders of Mechanize and former AI forecast researchers at Epoch AI, share their insights on the future of artificial intelligence. They challenge conventional views by arguing that AGI is still three decades away and that an intelligence explosion is unlikely. Instead, they foresee a period of explosive economic growth driven by automation and AI advancements.
19:48
Signs of an intelligence explosion include AI handling long-context tasks and achieving long-term goals.
40:16
AI surpassing human brain training compute could unlock sophisticated intelligence.
51:30
Companies with less compute and better vision can outperform incumbents.
1:00:57
Ege was hired for Epoch due to his extensive knowledge in economics and history.
1:23:49
Understanding AI deeply makes one more conservative about its capabilities.
1:45:03
AI accelerates change but poses risks of fast transformation.
2:03:38
Given high epistemic uncertainty about AI's future, classical liberalism and decentralization are advocated.
2:19:48
Intelligence isn't the bottleneck for technological or economic progress.
2:32:51
Willing to sacrifice understanding for advanced technology
2:41:32
Explosive growth will occur with AI that can flexibly substitute.
2:54:39
AIs have a massive advantage over humans due to their replicable and scalable nature.
2:54:43
Central planning could work with greater communication bandwidth and scalable models.
3:01:10
High-quality communication and being part of a community boosts career growth

Chapters

AGI will take another 3 decades
00:00
Even reasoning models lack animal intelligence
22:27
Intelligence explosion
45:04
Ege & Tamay’s story
1:00:57
Explosive economic growth
1:06:24
Will there be a separate AI economy?
1:33:00
Can we predictably influence the future?
1:47:08
Arms race dynamic
2:19:48
Is superintelligence a real thing?
2:29:48
Reasons not to expect explosive growth
2:35:45
Fully automated firms
2:49:00
Will central planning work after AGI?
2:54:43
Career advice
2:58:20

Transcript

Dwarkesh Patel: Today, I'm chatting with Tamay Besiroglu and Ege Erdil. They were previously running Epoch AI and are now launching Mechanize, which is a company dedicated to automating all work. One of the interesting points you made recently, Tameh, is t...