Our guest in this episode grew up in an abandoned town in Tasmania, and is now a researcher and blogger in Berkeley, California. After taking a degree in human ecology and science communication, Katja Grace co-founded AI Impacts, a research organisation trying to answer questions about the future of artificial intelligence.

Since 2016, Katja and her colleagues have published a series of surveys about what AI researchers think about progress on AI. The 2023 Expert Survey on Progress in AI was published this January, comprising responses from 2,778 participants. As far as we know, this is the biggest survey of its kind to date.

Among the highlights are that the time respondents expect it will take to develop an AI with human-level performance dropped between one and five decades since the 2022 survey. So ChatGPT has not gone unnoticed. 

Selected follow-ups:

• AI Impacts
• World Spirit Sock Puppet - Katja's blog
• Survey of 2,778 AI authors: six parts in pictures - from AI Impacts
• OpenAI researcher who resigned over safety concerns joins Anthropic - article  in The Verge about Jan Leike
• MIRI 2024 Mission and Strategy Update - from the Machine Intelligence Research Institute (MIRI)
• Future of Humanity Institute 2005-2024: Final Report - by Anders Sandberg (PDF)
• Centre for the Governance of AI
• Reasons for Persons - Article by Katja about Derek Parfit and theories of personal identity
•  OpenAI Says It Has Started Training GPT-4 Successor - article in Forbes

 Music: Spike Protein, by Koi Discovery, available under CC0 1.0 Public Domain Declaration