unfortunately i think the scenarios are vague enough that as a practical matter it will be tricky to adjudicate or decide whether they’ve happened or not
has come true (unlike many of my actual predictions about the rate of progress, which were consistently too bearish about the median world due to how I was hedging against the current paradigm of scaling running into a bottleneck).
Looking back at the dialogue, I can’t actually remember how I interpreted Daniel’s stage 4 when I offered my probability estimate of 30%. I don’t currently think there’s a 30% chance of “superintelligent AGI” over the next few years, which makes me think what I had in mind for stage 4 was something more impressive than what actually ended up happening.
This also matches my rough sense that the current world is more like my 75th − 80th percentile world from late 2023 and not the 90th+ percentile that would be needed to justify an update from 6% to 30%, which is the update I said I would make if I observed (4) happen.
tbf I myself think that it’s not clear we’re in stage 4, I think stage 3 is arguably where we’re at. But we seem closer to 4 than to 3 imo. Maybe we should interpolate between them?
I think we’re in stage 4 in some ways and stage 3 in others, yeah.
Looking back at the scenario, I think if we just push your predictions forward by 70% (multiply the time gap from when they were made to when the predicted events would happen by 1.7) they look pretty good. Arguably (2) happened in Q2 2025 (first time I remember AI agents being a big deal was with o3) and (3) happened in Q4 2025 (I think there was a transition in how autonomously the agents could function around that time, it’s definitely the time when I felt comfortable just letting the AI write code without manually reviewing everything it was writing).
If we take that view, (4) will probably “really happen” in Q4 2026.
Note that the scenario I gave wasn’t actually a prediction, or at least, it wasn’t my median world. I said elsewhere in thread that my median was 2027 for AGI, and implied that my median for ASI was more like 27/28:
To be clear, my view is that we’ll achieve AGI around 2027, ASI within a year of that, and then some sort of crazy robot-powered self-replicating economy within, say, three years of that. So 1000x energy consumption around then or shortly thereafter (depends on the doubling time of the crazy superintelligence-designed-and-managed robot economy).
So my actual prediction would have been like the scenario but stretched out another 1-2 years.
I think my prediction about
has come true (unlike many of my actual predictions about the rate of progress, which were consistently too bearish about the median world due to how I was hedging against the current paradigm of scaling running into a bottleneck).
Looking back at the dialogue, I can’t actually remember how I interpreted Daniel’s stage 4 when I offered my probability estimate of 30%. I don’t currently think there’s a 30% chance of “superintelligent AGI” over the next few years, which makes me think what I had in mind for stage 4 was something more impressive than what actually ended up happening.
This also matches my rough sense that the current world is more like my 75th − 80th percentile world from late 2023 and not the 90th+ percentile that would be needed to justify an update from 6% to 30%, which is the update I said I would make if I observed (4) happen.
tbf I myself think that it’s not clear we’re in stage 4, I think stage 3 is arguably where we’re at. But we seem closer to 4 than to 3 imo. Maybe we should interpolate between them?
I think we’re in stage 4 in some ways and stage 3 in others, yeah.
Looking back at the scenario, I think if we just push your predictions forward by 70% (multiply the time gap from when they were made to when the predicted events would happen by 1.7) they look pretty good. Arguably (2) happened in Q2 2025 (first time I remember AI agents being a big deal was with o3) and (3) happened in Q4 2025 (I think there was a transition in how autonomously the agents could function around that time, it’s definitely the time when I felt comfortable just letting the AI write code without manually reviewing everything it was writing).
If we take that view, (4) will probably “really happen” in Q4 2026.
Yep! Thanks.
Note that the scenario I gave wasn’t actually a prediction, or at least, it wasn’t my median world. I said elsewhere in thread that my median was 2027 for AGI, and implied that my median for ASI was more like 27/28:
So my actual prediction would have been like the scenario but stretched out another 1-2 years.
Makes sense.