causal

Long-horizon tasks may be far harder to train

A qualitative consideration that could significantly slow AI is that next-word prediction gives very rich supervision, whereas long-horizon tasks (like being an employee over a month) provide vastly fewer effective data points; in the worst case, training costs scale linearly with the horizon over which a system must operate, making sample efficiency on economically valuable long tasks the real bottleneck.

causalpending

Speaker

Paul Christiano

Evidence Quote

the number of effective data points you get of that task is vastly smaller than the number of effective data points you get at this very short horizon.

Source

Paul Christiano — Preventing an AI takeoverDwarkesh Patel Podcast
Created: 6/13/2026, 3:36:05 AM

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