I take issue with lumping everything into “OpenBrain.” I understand why AI 2027 does it this way, but OpenAI (OAI), Google Deep Mind (GDM), Anthropic, and others are notably different and largely within spitting distance of each other. Treating there as being a front-runner singleton with competitors that are 3+ months away is very wrong, even if the frontier labs weren’t significantly different, since the race dynamics are a big part of the story. The authors do talk about this, indicating that they think gaps between labs will widen, as access to cutting-edge models starts compounding.
I think slipstream effects will persist. The most notable here is cross-polination by researchers, such as when an OAI employee leaves and joins GDM. (Non-disclosure agreements only work so well.) But this kind of cross-pollination also applies to people chatting at a party. Then there’s the publishing of results, actual espionage, and other effects. There was a time in the current world where OpenAI was clearly the front-runner, and that is now no longer true. I think the same dynamics will probably continue to hold.
In our wargames we don’t lump them all together. Also, over the last six months I’ve updated towards the race being more neck-and-neck than I realized, and thus updated against this aspect of AI-2027. I still think it’s a reasonable guess though; even if the race is neck-and-neck now due to OpenAI faltering, regression to the mean gets you back to one company having a couple month lead in a few years.
In our wargames we don’t lump them all together. Also, over the last six months I’ve updated towards the race being more neck-and-neck than I realized, and thus updated against this aspect of AI-2027. I still think it’s a reasonable guess though; even if the race is neck-and-neck now due to OpenAI faltering, regression to the mean gets you back to one company having a couple month lead in a few years.