Understanding AI Agents: Time Horizons, Sycophancy, and Future Risks (with Zvi Mowshowitz)

On this episode, Zvi Mowshowitz joins me to discuss sycophantic AIs, bottlenecks limiting autonomous AI agents, and the true utility of benchmarks in measuring progress. We then turn to time horizons of AI agents, the impact of automating scientific research, and constraints on scaling inference compute. Zvi also addresses humanity’s uncertain AI-driven future, the unique features setting AI apart from other technologies, and AI’s growing influence in financial trading.  

You can follow Zvi's excellent blog here: https://thezvi.substack.com  

Timestamps:  

00:00:00 Preview and introduction  

00:02:01 Sycophantic AIs  

00:07:28 Bottlenecks for AI agents  

00:21:26 Are benchmarks useful?  

00:32:39 AI agent time horizons  

00:44:18 Impact of automating research 

00:53:00 Limits to scaling inference compute  

01:02:51 Will the future go well for humanity?  

01:12:22 A good plan for safe AI  

01:26:03 What makes AI different?  

01:31:29 AI in trading