People are making the same mistake with Covid and AGI

A cognitive bias from the Covid period is increasingly relevant to AI, as people are making the same mistake with Covid and AGI. The cost of using a fixed level of intelligence has significantly decreased, with Stanford's AI Index noting that GPT-3.5-level performance on MMLU dropped from approximately $20 per million tokens in late 2022 to $0.07 by late 2024. Humans are systematically biased towards predicting changes sooner than they occur, as imagining a world different from the recent past is challenging.

This report uniquely links the cognitive biases observed during the Covid pandemic to current predictions about AGI, unlike other analyses focusing solely on technological advancements.