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