I have a question about this chart. It seems like you fit a double-exponential function to it (dashed line), because the y-axis is exponential. Why didn’t you fit a regular exponential to it, like the red line? It seems like if you do that, the projections for the whole article should be years slower.
Overall, great article. It changed my mind in the direction of making this timeline feel more plausible.
Great question! First of all, we formed our views on AI timelines and had mostly finished writing AI 2027 before this METR graph was published. So it wasn’t causally relevant to our timelines.
Side question, but you had recently moved your AGI median from 2027 to 2028 after updating on Grok 3 and GPT-4.5. Has this changed, especially with Gemini 2.5 and o3/o4-mini + these new METR datapoints?
I think I’ll wait and see what the summer looks like and then do another update to my timelines. If indeed the horizon length trend is accelerating already, it’ll be clear by the summer & my timelines will shorten accordingly.
I have a question about this chart. It seems like you fit a double-exponential function to it (dashed line), because the y-axis is exponential. Why didn’t you fit a regular exponential to it, like the red line? It seems like if you do that, the projections for the whole article should be years slower.
Overall, great article. It changed my mind in the direction of making this timeline feel more plausible.
Great question! First of all, we formed our views on AI timelines and had mostly finished writing AI 2027 before this METR graph was published. So it wasn’t causally relevant to our timelines.
Secondly, see this comment on the original METR graph in which I make the superexponential prediction. This is the most direct answer to your question.
Third, our timelines forecast discusses the exponential fit vs. superexponential fit and our reasoning; we actually put probability mass in both.
Fourth, new data points are already above the exponential trend.
Thanks for the clarification.
Side question, but you had recently moved your AGI median from 2027 to 2028 after updating on Grok 3 and GPT-4.5. Has this changed, especially with Gemini 2.5 and o3/o4-mini + these new METR datapoints?
I think I’ll wait and see what the summer looks like and then do another update to my timelines. If indeed the horizon length trend is accelerating already, it’ll be clear by the summer & my timelines will shorten accordingly.