When are we jumping?

What’s at the bottom?

Do we have a parachute?

Market Predictions

Six months ago, I wrote What Would You Do If You Had 8 Years Left to Live?, where I explained that the market predicted Artificial General Intelligence (AGI, an AI capable of doing what most humans can do) eight years later, by 2032. Since then, that date has been pulled forward. It’s now predicted to arrive in just six years, so six months were enough to pull the date forward by one year. Odds now looks like this:

But AI that matches human intelligence is not the most concerning milestone. The most concerning one is ASI, Artificial SuperIntelligence: an intelligence so far beyond human capabilities that we can’t even comprehend it.

According to forecasters, that will come in five years:

Two years to weak AGI, so by the end of 2026

Three years later, Superintelligence, so by the end of 2029

As you can see, these forecasts aren’t perfectly consistent, but they are aligned: An AI that can do any task better than any human is half a decade away.

Who’s best positioned to know for sure? I assume it’s the heads of the biggest AI labs in the world. What do they say?

Cutting-Edge Experts

Here’s another quote from him:

I think powerful AI² could come as early as 2026.—Machines of Loving Grace, Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic

And another:

Two years ago, we were at high school level. Last year we were at undergrad level. This year we’re at PhD level. If you eyeball the rate at which these capabilities are increasing, it does make you think that we’ll get there in 2026 or 2027.—Dario Amodei with Lex Friedman

Moving to OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, here’s its CEO, Sam Altman:

We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it. We are beginning to turn our aim beyond that, to superintelligence in the true sense of the word. With superintelligence, we can do anything else.—Reflections, Sam Altman

Here’s the head of product:

"AI going from the millionth best coder, to the thousandth best coder, to the 175th best coder in 3 to 4 months… We’re on a very steep trajectory here, I don’t even know if it will be 2027, I think it could be earlier.”

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5672145&forum_id=2Elisa#48600467)

The best AI models were about as intelligent as rats four years ago, dogs three years ago, high school students two years ago, average undergrads a year ago, PhDs a few months ago, and now they’re better than human PhDs in their own field. Just project that into the future.

The makers of these models are all saying this is scaling faster than they expected, and they’re not using weird tricks. In fact they see opportunities for optimization everywhere. Intelligence just scales up. They believe AGI is 1-4 years away. This is only a bit more optimistic than the markets, which estimate it will arrive in ~2-6 years.

AIs are now like elite software developers. And AI is already improving AI. Put these two together, and you can imagine how quickly AI development speed will accelerate.

At this point, it doesn’t look like intelligence will be a barrier to AGI. Rather, it might be other factors like energy or computing power.

Except DeepSeek just proved that we can make models that consume orders of magnitude less money, energy, and compute.

So although electricity, data, and especially compute might be limiting factors to AI growth, we are constantly finding ways to make these models more efficient, eliminating these physical constraints.

In other words: AI is progressing ever faster, we have no clear barriers to hinder their progress, and those in the know believe that means we’ll see AGI in half a decade.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5672145&forum_id=2Elisa#48600469)

If you haven't maed it by then, you never will. Social mobility will be over

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5672145&forum_id=2Elisa#48600512)