https://www.elilifland.com/. You can give me anonymous feedback here. I often change my mind and don’t necessarily endorse past writings.
elifland
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Q1 2026 Timelines Update
I think the timelines are plausible but solidly on the shorter end; I think the exact AI 2027 timeline to fully automating AI R&D is around my 12th percentile outcome. So the timeline is plausible to me (in fact, similarly plausible to my views at the time of writing), but substantially faster than my median scenario (which would be something like early 2030s).
Roughly agree.
I expect the takeoff to be extremely fast after we get AIs that are better than the best humans at everything, i.e., within a few months of AIs that are broadly superhuman, we have AIs that are wildly superhuman.
With my median parameters, the AIFM says 1.5 years between TED-AI to ASI. But this isn’t taking into account hardware R&D automation, production automation, or the industrial explosion. So maybe adjust that to ~1-1.25 years. However, there’s obviously lots of uncertainty.
Additionally, conditioning on TED-AI in 2027 would make it faster. e.g., looking at our analysis page, p(AC->ASI ⇐ 1year) conditional on AC in 2027 is a bit over 40%, as opposed to 27% unconditional. So after accounting for this, maybe my median is ~0.5-1 years conditional on TED-AI in 2027, again with lots of uncertainty.
There’s also a question of whether our definition of ASI, the gap between an ASI and the best humans is 2x greater than the gap between the best humans and the median professional, at virtually all cognitive tasks, would count as wildly superhuman. Probably?
Anyway, all this is to say, I think my median is a bit slower than yours by a factor of around 2-4, but your view is still not on the edges of my distribution. For a minimum bar for how much probability I assign to TED-AI->ASI in <=3 months, see on our forecast page that I assign all-things-considered ~15% to p(AC->ASI <=3 months), and this is a lower bound because (a) TED-AI->ASI is shorter, (b) the effects described abobe re: conditioning on 2027.
(I’m also not sure what the relationship the result with median parameters has compared to the median of TED-AI to ASI across Monte Carlos which we haven’t reported anywhere and I’m not going to bother to look up for this comment.)
I think wildly superhuman AIs would be somewhat more transformative more quickly than AI 2027 depicts
I tentatively agree, but I don’t feel like I have a great framework or world model driving my predictions here.
(i) nanotechnology, leading to things like the biosphere being consumed by tiny self replicating robots which double at speeds similar to the fastest biological doubling times (between hours (amoebas) and months (rabbits))
Yeah I think we should have mentioned nanotech. The difference between hours and months is huge though, if it’s months then I think we have something like AI 2027 or perhaps slower.
(ii) extremely superhuman persuasion and political maneuvering, sufficient to let the AI steer policy to a substantially greater extent than it did in AI 2027. In AI 2027, the AI gained enough political power to prevent humans from interacting with ongoing intelligence and industrial explosion (which they were basically on track to do anyways), whereas my best guess is that the AI would gain enough political power to do defacto whatever it wanted, and would therefore result in the AI consolidating power faster (and not keep up the charade of humans being in charge for a period of several years)
I’m not sure it would be able to do whatever it wanted, but I think it at minimum could perform somewhat better than the best human politicians in history, and probably much better. But being able to do de facto whatever it wants is a very high bar. I think it’s plausible that the AI can, at least given a few months rather than many years, convince people to do what it wants only within a set of actions that people wouldn’t have been strongly against doing without AI intervention. I don’t necessarily disagree but I probably have more weight than you on something like AI 2027 levels of influence, or somewhat higher but not vastly higher.
I also think there are many unknown unknowns downstream of ASI which are really hard to account for in a scenario like AI 2027, but nonetheless are likely to change the picture a lot.
Agree
its unlikely that a few month slowdown is sufficient to avoid misaligned AI takeover (e.g. maybe 30%)
I’m more optimistic here, around 65%. This is including cases in which there wasn’t much of a slowdown needed in the first place, so cases where the slowdown isn’t doing the work of avoiding takeover. Though as with your point about how fast wildly superhuman AIs would transform the world, I don’t think I have a great framework for estimating this probability.
I’m not sure why you list (3) as a disagreement at all though. To have a disagrement, you should argue for an ending we should have written instead that had at least as good of an outcome but is more plausible.
This image from the article is what I was most interested in:
Thinking this through step by step in the framework of the AI Futures Model:
First, I’ll check what the model says, then I’ll reconstruct the reasoning behind why it predicts that.
By default, with Daniel’s parameters, Automated Coder (AC) happens in 2030 and ASI happens in 2031 1.33 years later.
If I stop experiment and training compute growth at the start of 2027, then the model predicts Automated Coder in 2039 rather than 2030. So 4x slower in calendar time (exactly matching habyrka’s guess). It also looks to have well over a 5 year takeoff from AC to ASI as opposed to the default of 1.33 years.
I got this by plugging in this modified version of our time series to this unreleased branch of our website.
However, this is highly sensitive to the timing of the compute growth pause, because it’s a shock to the flow rather than the stock. e.g. if I instead stop growth at the start of 2029 as in this worksheet, then AC happens in Mar 2031, taking ~2.2 years instead of ~1.2, so slowing things down by <2x. It does still slow down takeoff from AC to ASI to 4 years, so by ~3x (and this is probably at least a slight underestimate because we don’t model hardware R&D automation).
Now I’ll reconstruct why this is the case using simplifications to the model (I actually did these calcluations before plugging the time series things into our model).
Currently, experiment compute is growing at around 3x/year, and human labor around 2x/year. Conditional on no AGI, we’re projecting experiment compute growth to slow to around 2x/year by 2030, and human labor growth to slow to around 1.5x/year.
Figuring out the effect of removing experiment growth is a bit complicated for various reasons.
On the margin, informed by interviews/surveys, we model a ~2.5x gain in “research effort” from 10x more experiment compute. Which if applied instantaneously, would mean a 2.5x slowdown in algorithmic progress.
We estimate that a 100x in human parallel coding labor gives a ~2x in research effort on the margin. We don’t model quantity of research labor, but I expect probably the gains would be relatively small as quality matters a lot more than quantity; let’s shade up to 3x.
So naively based on our model parameters and a simplified version of our model (Cobb-Douglas used to locally approximate a CES), by default the growth in research effort per year from experiment compute is 2.5^log(2-3)=~1.3-1.55x, and from human labor is sqrt(3)^log(1.5-2)=~1.1-1.2x. Meaning that roughly log(1.4)/(log(1.4)+log(1.15))=~70% of research effort growth is coming from experiment compute.
So to simplify from now on, let’s think about what happens if research effort growth has a one-time shock a constant 30% of what it otherwise would have been.
What does this actually mean in terms of the effect on algorithmic/software progess? This means that the shock in research effort growth will eventually cause the software growth rate to be 30% of what it would have been otherwise, but it steadily decreases toward 30% over time (intuitively, the immediate effect is 0 because you have to actually wait for the “missing new experiment compute” to take effect).
(possibly wrong) I had Claude generate roughly the trajectory of the growth rate change:
The above graph seems to give decent intuition for why the averaged-over-the-relevant-period slowdown in software progress from no more experiment compute might be about 2x (with the 2027.0 growth stoppage), and therefore the overall slowdown from no more compute might be about 4x. It looks like the average of the first 12 years might be close to 0.5.
All of the above is ignoring automation for simplicity. Taking into account automation would mean that more of the gains from labor, so the slowdown is smaller. But on the other hand, as you get more coding labor you get more bottlenecked on experiment compute (which the Cobb-Douglas doesn’t take into account); in the AIFM, you’d eventually get hard bottlenecked, you can have a maximum of 15x research effort gain from coding labor increases alone. Looks like these factors and other deviations from the model might roughly cancel out in the case we’re considering.
I think you can’t get around the uncertainty by modeling uplift as some more complicated function of coding automation fraction as in the AIFM, because you’re still assuming that’s logistic, we can’t measure it any better than uplift, plus we’re still uncertain how they’re related. So we really do need better data.
But in the AIFM the coding automation logistic is there to predict the dynamics regarding how much coding automation speeds progress pre-AC. It doesn’t have to do with setting the effective compute requirement for AC. I might be misunderstanding something, sorry if so.
Re: the 1.6 number, oh that should actually be 1.8 sorry. I think it didn’t get updated after a last minute change to the parameter value. I will fix that soon. Also, that’s the parallel uplift. In our model, the serial multiplier/uplift is sqrt(parallel uplift).
Suppose uplift at the start of 2026 was 1.6x as in the AIFM’s median
Where are you getting this 1.6 number?
With respect to the rest of your comment, it feels to me like we have such little evidence about current uplift and what trend it follows (e.g. whether this assumption about a % automation curve that is logistic and its translation to uplift is a reasonable functional form). I’m not sure how strongly we disagree though. I’m much more skeptical of the claim that uplift can give much tighter confidence intervals than that it can give similar or slightly better ones. Again, this could change if we had much better data in a year or two.
Grading AI 2027′s 2025 Predictions
Grats on getting this out! I am overall excited about exploring models that rely more on uplift than on time horizons. A few thoughts:
It might be nice to indicate how these outputs relate to your all-things-considered views. To me your explicit model seems to be implausibly confident in 99% automation before 2040.
In particular, the “doubling difficulty growth factor”, which measures whether time horizon increases superexponentially, could change the date of automated coder from 2028 to 2049! I suspect that time horizon is too poorly defined to nail down this parameter, and rough estimates of more direct AI capability metrics like uplift can give much tighter confidence intervals.
I am skeptical that uplift measurements actually give much tighter confidence intervals.
After talking to Thomas about this verbally, we both agree that directly using uplift measurements rather than time horizon could plausibly be better by the end of 2026, though we might have different intuitions about the precise likelihood.
Effective labor/compute ratio only changes by 10-100x during the period in question, so it doesn’t affect results much anyway. The fastest trajectories are most affected by compute:labor ratio, but for trajectories that get to 99% automation around 2034, the ratio stays around 1:1.
This isn’t true in our model because we allow full coding automation. Given that this is the case in your model, Cobb-Douglas seems like a reasonable approximation.
I think my personal beliefs would say “it’s not very useful” or something. I think the “ban AGI locally” plan is dependent on a pretty specific path to be useful and I don’t read the current phrasing as ruling out “One country Bans it and also does some other stuff in conjunction.” (actually, upon reflection I’m not that confident I know what sort of scenario you have in mind here)
I think that a slowdown that is in the neighborhood of “ban AI development temporarily near but not after max-controllable AI” could potentially be very impactful. Banning AI development for long enough to allow China to pull ahead is less clear. I’m not sure what the intention of the sentence was, but to me it seems to imply that any domestic action on its own would be of very little use.
If you would come to very similar March but object to details of the current framing, please let me know in the comments, and consider registering your email for the “Keep me informed” checkbox without making the commitment.
There’s a decent chance I would join for the March as is given that I directionally agree with its sentiment and its recommendation. But I don’t agree with some of the “We believe...” statements, which sound like they are intended to speak for all of the people who came to the March.
I disagree with these:
We believe that if any company or group, anywhere on the planet, builds an artificial superintelligence using anything remotely like current techniques, based on anything remotely like the present understanding of AI, then everyone, everywhere on Earth, will die.
We do not mean that as hyperbole. We are not exaggerating for effect. We think that is the most direct extrapolation from the knowledge, evidence, and institutional conduct around artificial intelligence today.
This is stated quite confidently, implying >>50% on this, while I have less than 50%. Well maybe it could be over 50%, if there is a strict operationalization of what counts as remotely similar to current techniques and present understanding. In any case, I think I disagree with what most people would takeaway from this statement.
It’s not useful for only one country to ban advancement of AI capabilities within its own borders. AI development would just keep happening in other countries by people who didn’t understand the dangers, until eventually someone somewhere built machines that were substantially smarter than any human.
This seems to imply that the US government could not on its own significantly decrease p(doom). That seems very wrong to me, implementing a slowdown for a few months to a year at the right moment seems like a huge deal. An international treaty would be better, but this seems too defeatist about domestic options.
We did reach out to the contact email for each of the publications. Only one responded, and they denied that there was anything wrong in their article. It might be useful to reach out again linking this blog post, though.
Fair enough. There is some reasoning on my end at the bottom of the post:
Dec 2024: 2032. Updated on early versions of the timelines model predicting shorter timelines than I expected. Also, RE-Bench scores were higher than I would have guessed.
Apr 2025: 2031. Updated based on the two variants of the AI 2027 timelines model giving 2027 and 2028 superhuman coder (SC) medians. My SC median was 2030, higher than the within-model median because I placed some weight on the model being confused, a poor framework, missing factors, etc. I also gave some weight to other heuristics and alternative models, which seemed overall point in the direction of longer timelines. I shifted my median back by a year from SC to get one for TED-AI/AGI.
Jul 2025: 2033. Updated based on corrections to our timelines model and downlift.
Nov 2025: 2035. Updated based on the AI Futures Model’s intermediate results. (source)
Jan 2026: Jan 2035 (~2035.0). For Automated Coder (AC), my all-things-considered median is about 1.5 years later than the model’s output. For TED-AI, my all-things-considered median is instead 1.5 earlier than the model’s output, because I believe the model’s takeoff is too slow, due to modeling neither hardware R&D automation nor broad economic automation. See my forecast here. My justification for pushing back the AC date is in the first “Eli’s notes on their all-things-considered forecast” expandable, and the justification for adjusting takeoff to be faster is in the second.And Daniel and I both wrote up relevant reasoning in our model announcement post. (edit: and Daniel also wrote some at the bottom of this blog post).
Clarifying how our AI timelines forecasts have changed since AI 2027
20% and 80% time horizons are kind of fake because there aren’t enough parameters to fit them separately.
We fit a two-parameter logistic model which doesn’t fit the top and bottom of the success curve linearly, so improving performance on 20% horizon tasks can lower 80% horizon.
My understanding is that you can still have a similarly unattractive issue with the 50% time horizon where performing better at high horizon lengths can reduce the 50% time horizon because it makes the slope less steep, but it doesn’t seem to be as high magnitude of an issue as with 20+80%.
Thanks for the comments! Besides the below, I’m curious what your overall views are. What does your distribution for AC look like?
The authors don’t seem to address the possibility that we are seeing a temporary acceleration of AI, because the labs are ramping methods that are much more expensive to scale, but they are doing so from very low baselines.
I think this is basically addressed in our uncertainty over the present doubling time, at least that’s how I’d think of it for myself. Note that my median present doubling time estimate of 5.5 months is slower than the potentially accelerated recent time horizon trend.
I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that AI-aided R&D acceleration has happened in any meaningful way,
Our model reflects that, with my median parameters the current software R&D upflit is 1.1x.
2- One place where has been an acceleration is on my spending on AI. I am now spending more than one thousand dollars in tokens and the marginal task of my job I am automating with AI costs what I used to pay for AI during an entire month. Toby Ord argues that the costs of AI are increasing exponentially: “the hourly costs for some models are now close to human costs.” While the evidence is small and we need further work, if each jump makes the marginal task exponentially more expensive, but for a fixed level of intelligence, we get prices 90% cheaper per year, one could imagine a point where we achieve the AGI at 2028, but only can deploy it economically in 2030. And a world where we achieve the Automated Coder in 2031, but only can deploy it economically in 2035.
Our Automated Coder has efficiency definitions built in, so you wouldn’t put it that way, you’d instead say you get an Automated Coder in 2035 and a very expensive replication of AC abilities in 2031. I personally think that a large majority of the relevant recent gains have not come from inference scaling, but if I did think that a lot of it had been, I would adjust my present doubling time to be slower.
Here’s some portions of a rough Slack message I wrote recently on this topic:
Let me try… a concrete case study: let’s compare GPT-4 and GPT-5 and long-horizon coding (if we did GPT-3 vs. GPT-4 it would be even more obvious, but perhaps better to discuss a jump that’s more recent).
Our model says that this is a 10,000x increase in effective compute, i.e. 4 OOMs (it seems more relevant to discuss something like effective compute, ECI, etc. rather than pure compute scaling, because pure compute scaling isn’t what happens in practice). Now your numbers (as far as I understand) say that we could achieve the same gains with 6 OOMs of inference compute if this all came from pretraining, or 2 OOMs of inference compute if this all came from RL [note for LW: this was responding to the exchange rates proposed in https://www.tobyord.com/writing/how-well-does-rl-scale]. From https://evaluations.metr.org/gpt-5-report/, I’m attaching what they say for the curve of tokens->performance on METR’s time horizon suite.
We can’t even see GPT-4 here, but GPT-4o for example is clearly basically asymptoting at something like 10 minute time horizons. Meanwhile GPT-5 is above 2 hours at max tokens. If we look at 10 minute time horizons, then according to this graph GPT-5 is a bit more expensive, though iirc the graph overrepresents GPT-5 costs (e.g. it should not be near o3′s costs). But if we look at 2 hour horizons (or even like 20+ mins), it’s essentially an infinite cost improvement over GPT-4o, much less GPT-4 (this is a bit oversimplified because models obviously have probabilistic success rates at each horizon, but I don’t think it changes the basic takeaway).So stepping back, we see that how we compare scaling effective compute / ECI / “years of recent progress” (pick your favorite) to inference scaling just changes a ton based on what difficulty of task you’re looking at, but if it’s more difficult (and if you are looking at a larger effective compute difference) then you basically can’t match it with any practically achievable amounts of inference scaling. And imo those are the tasks we care the most about! So I find these inference scaling comparison numbers interesting and informative for some questions, but not as relevant to the overall picture relative to other capability forecasting lenses.
Btw also attaching a pic from https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-opus-4-5 comparing SWEBench-Verified on Sonnet and Opus 4.5. Obviously just one data point but I found it interesting on just a short time frame (~2 months) Anthropic saw 5x token efficiency improvement at high levels of SWEBench-Verified performance (Opus 4.5 is about 1-1.7x as expensive per token), and that’s not even looking at the highest levels, I assume the multiplier would be much higher if you tried to scaling Sonnet to reach Opus’s high performance.
[end Slack message]
Furthermore, it seems that once capabilities can be reached very expensively, they pretty reliably get cheaper very quickly. See here for my research into this or just skip to Epoch’s data which I used as input to my parameter esitmate; happy to answer questions, sorry that my explanation is pretty rough.
3- Despite the METR and ECI indexes of capabilities per unit of time following an exponential with even an acceleration, the underlying trends have changed massively. a- Pretraining scaling has slowed down massively since the GPT-4.5 debacle. b- Massive efforts have been done to create human cured data around the matters we care about. SemiAnalysis say the labs are spending single-digits billions on human generated data. Beren argues most algorithimic progress is data progress. Obviously, replacing the corpus of text from random dudes debating in a 2007 forum to all the intermediate steps of a math proof by a math PhD improves the models. Obviously, this can’t scale and is an one-off improvement. b- Inference-time scaling has been improving the models considerably. To the point, I consider OpenAI models like GPT-5.2-Codex-High unusable, given how slow they are. Not only that, but gains from inference-time scaling must be paid every time they are executed. I don’t think we can continue to scale inference time compute into the back-half of the decade. c- Toby Ord also argues that RL is in on the order of 1,000,000x less compute efficient than pre-training. He says “I estimate that at the time of writing (Oct 2025), we’ve already seen something like a 1,000,000x scale-up in RL training and it required ≤2x the total training cost. But the next 1,000,000x scale-up would require 1,000,000x the total training cost, which is not possible in the foreseeable future.” Regardless of the level, I feel anyone paying attention feels the same way. Ilya argues that RL is learning from a straw.
I think I already addressed at least part of this in my answer to (2).
4- The authors don’t address that they are making a somewhat unverifiable prediction. The largest tasks inside the METR are on the order of 16 hours. I’d argue that the complexity of benchmarking translates to the complexity of improving the models themselves.
I don’t understand this. What exactly do you want us to address? Why should we adjust our predictions because of this? We do explicitly say we are assuming a hypothetical “METR-HRS-Extended” benchmark in our explanation. Ok maybe you are saying that it will be hard to create long-horizon tasks which will slow down the trend. I would say that I adjust for this when my make my all-things-considered AC prediction longer due to the potential for data bottlenecks, and also to some extent by making the doubling difficulty growth factor higher than it otherwise would be.
All that said, I confess the straight lines on a chart are immensely persuasive and hard to not extrapolate for many years through the Lindy Effect.
Yeah for the parts I didn’t explicitly respond to, my response is mainly that it seems like this sort of inside view reasoning is valuable but overall I give more weight to trend extrapolation, and historically simple trend extrapolations like “when will we have the same ops/second as the human brain” have performed pretty well, as we discuss in our blog post.
Also when I changed the “How much easier/harder each coding time horizon doubling gets” parameter by small amounts, the forecasted time from AC to ASI changes significantly (2.7 years at 0.90, over 4 years for 1.00), so it looks like stages 2 and 3 are affected as well.
I’d guess that this is only because compute growth (and human labor growth, but that doesn’t matter as much) at that point is slower during takeoff if takeoff starts later.
Let’s test this, this theory would predict that whatever time horizon growth parameter I changed, would result in the same takeoff if it ends up starting at the same time:
From the starting state, if I raise “How much easier/harder...” to 0.99, AC happens in 1/2040, and ASI happens in 3/2044 (so 4 years 2 months, replicating you)
If I instead raise present doubling time (“How long it...”) to 9.5 months, then AC happens in 12/2039, and ASI happens in 2/2044 (same speed as in (1))
I can’t get AC at that time by only raising AC time horizon requirement, but if I raise it to the max, then raise “How much easier/harder...”to 0.95, I get pretty close: AC at Jul 2038, and ASI at Aug 2042. Barely under 4 year takeoff. If I also raise present doubling time to 6 months, then I get 8/2040 to 11/2044 takeoff, 4 year 3 month takeoff.
Ok, looks like I was right. I’m pretty sure that these do affect takeoff, but only by changing the starting date.Edit: actually sorry these can also affect takeoff via the coding automation task efficiencies when reaching AC / start of takeoff, because if the effective compute requirement is different then the logistic curve has a lower slope, not just shifted over to the right. My guess is that the compute growth is having a larger impact, but we’d have to do a bit more work to check (either way each time horizon growth parameter would have the same effect if it reuslted in AC happening at the same time, because all the parameters do is set the effective compute requirement for AC).
Thanks for writing this up! Excited about research taste experiments.
Is human research taste modeled correctly? Eg it seems likely to me that the 0.3% of top humans add more than 0.3%*3.7x to the “aggregate research taste” of a lab because they can set research directions. There are maybe more faithful ways to model it; all the ones Eli mentioned seemed far more complicated.
A minimal change would be to change the aggregation from mean to something else, we were going to do this but didn’t get to it in time. But yeah to do it more faithfully I think would be pretty complicated because you have to model experiment compute budgets for each human/AI. Note also that we aren’t really modeling human/AI taste complementarity.
Or, they could coordinate better (especially with all the human ex-coders to help them), and decrease the parallelization penalties for labor and/or compute
Agree that ideally there would at least be different penalties for AIs vs. humans doing the labor.
Is modeling AI research taste as exponential in human standard deviations valid? I have no idea whether someone 9 standard deviations above the human median would be able to find 3.7^(9/3) = 50x better research ideas or not.
Note that because of limits (which weren’t in your summary) the model is in practice subexponential, but exponential is generally a good approximation for the model around the human range. See here (4.2.2) for an explanation of taste limits.
Regarding whether it’s a good approximation in the human range, we have some n=12 survey results on this here, obviously take with a huge grain of salt, but extracted from these results the ratio of (taste per SD between the 90th percentile and top researchers) and (taste per SD between 50th percentile and top) appears to be fairly close to 1: 1.01 median if assuming a population of 1000 researchers, and 0.95 median if assuming a population of 100.
Thanks for the thoughts! I’m not sure I exactly understand your point. I do think that we should think about the relationship between the time horizon and the AC effective compute requirement directly, which is why we chose to use this to set the effective compute requirement. If a model has achieved very high time horizons, then we think that this is direct evidence for them being an AC. Note that we also optionally have an effective compute gap as well, to be added after reaching the time horizon requirement.
I’m also not sure what you mean about the relationship being 1-1, like why we should increase the effective compute requirement rather than decrease if we instead had decided to try to use AI R&D speedup to anchor the requirement. Why would we think that setting the effective compute requirement via the AI R&D speedup would predictably give a higher effective compute requirement? I don’t think the METR trend being superexponential implies anything one way or the other. They are just different metrics and thus we would use a totally different method if we had instead tried to set the requirement using AI R&D speedup. I’m not immediately sure what method would be best though given that we don’t have a trend for it. If we had more high-quality data on coding uplift over time, then that could help us out, and I think that would be a reasonable alternative thing to extrapolate (Daniel discusses this a bit in the post), but I don’t have a prior on whether it would lead to a lower or higher requirement than extrapolating time horizons (in fact a quick guess would be that it would lead to a lower requirement, given Opus 4.5′s reported much higher uplift than Sonnet 4.5).
Even better could be if we already had these sorts of arguments collected. https://goodjudgment.com/superforecasting-ai/ contains links to 17 superforecasters’ reviews of Carlsmith’s p(doom) report, some of them supposedly AI experts. I invite people to skim through some of them.
Copying very relevant portions of a comment I wrote in Mar 2024:
I think EAs often overrate superforecasters’ opinions, they’re not magic. A lot of superforecasters aren’t great (at general reasoning, but even at geopolitical forecasting), there’s plenty of variation in quality.
General quality: Becoming a superforecaster selects for some level of intelligence, open-mindedness, and intuitive forecasting sense among the small group of people who actually make 100 forecasts on GJOpen. There are tons of people (e.g. I’d guess very roughly 30-60% of AI safety full-time employees?) who would become superforecasters if they bothered to put in the time.
Some background: as I’ve written previously I’m intuitively skeptical of the benefits of large amounts of forecasting practice (i.e. would guess strong diminishing returns).
Specialties / domain expertise: Contra a caricturized “superforecasters are the best at any forecasting questions” view, consider a grantmaker deciding whether to fund an organization. They are, whether explicitly or implicitly, forecasting a distribution of outcomes for the grant. But I’d guess most would agree that superforecasters would do significantly worse than grantmakers at this “forecasting question”. A similar argument could be made for many intellectual jobs, which could be framed as forecasting. The question on whether superforecasters are relatively better isn’t “Is this task answering a forecasting question“ but rather “What are the specific attributes of this forecasting question”.
Some people seem to think that the key difference between questions superforecasters are good at vs. smart domain experts are in questions that are *resolvable* or *short-term*. I tend to think that the main differences are along the axes of *domain-specificity* and *complexity*, though these are of course correlated with the other axes. Superforecasters are selected for being relatively good at short-term, often geopolitical questions.
As I’ve written previously: It varies based on the question/domain how much domain expertise matters, but ultimately I expect reasonable domain experts to make better forecasts than reasonable generalists in many domains.
There’s an extreme here where e.g. forecasting what the best chess move is obviously better done by chess experts rather than superforecasters.
So if we think of a spectrum from geopolitics to chess, it’s very unclear to me where things like long-term AI forecasts land.
This intuition seems to be consistent with the lack of quality existing evidence described in Arb’s report (which debunked the “superforecasters beat intelligence experts without classified information” claim!).