Link to original article

Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: The effect of horizon length on scaling laws, published by Jacob Hilton on February 1, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.The scaling of optimal model size with compute is a key input into the biological anchors framework for forecasting transformative AI. In particular, the "effective horizon length" introduces a multiplier into this scaling law that can have a big effect on forecasts.This paper studies this scaling law for several RL environments: Procgen, Dota 2 and a toy MNIST-based environment. The last of these is used to study the effect of the task horizon length in a toy setting. There are a number of takeaways for the biological anchors framework, which are summarized in Section 5.4.Thanks for listening. To help us out with The Nonlinear Library or to learn more, please visit nonlinear.org.