Scott Alexander's open letter to Steven Pinker: g-factor is real and AI scaling will keep climbing
Astral Codex Ten · rss · 2026-10-07
In a long Astral Codex Ten post, Scott Alexander responds to Steven Pinker's open letter on AI risk, rebutting his four anti-superintelligence arguments. He argues general intelligence is a real, measurable factor: g-like structure appears in rats, primates and birds; in AI, a single factor explains 80% of benchmark score variance (Ruan et al.); and Epoch's Capabilities Index tracks scaling closely. Since each GPT generation is smarter and no one can place the asymptote at human level, the doomer extrapolation stands. Pinker's repeated predictions of stalled progress since 2019 have failed, and an internal OpenAI model has reportedly solved Navier-Stokes. Half-mocking in tone, Alexander says he proposed a debate to honorably address Pinker's "dishonorable" writing (duels being illegal in California) and commits to a respectful intellectual exchange.
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