Rethinking the evolutionary anchor

In Forecasting TAI with biological anchors, Ajeya Cotra proposes the “evolutionary anchor” as a hypothesis for how the compute needed to train generally intelligent systems, based on “the total FLOP performed over the course of evolution, since the first neurons” (Cotra, 2020). But there have been some concerns about whether this definition is appropriate – it does not account for the compute for simulating the environment (Sempere, 2022, and anthropic considerations might prove highly important (Erdil, 2022). Assess the significance of these concerns, and reassess the viability of the current definition of the anchor.