Many thanks to Max Farrens, Gabe Fried, and Thomas Larsen for pairing with me through significant parts of writing and researching this essay.
You can watch or listen to me narrate this essay on YouTube, Spotify, and Apple Podcasts.
If you asked me earlier this year how far away we are from superintelligence, I’d probably have said at least the better part of a decade. But over the last three months, I’ve updated my views a ton. I’ve been debating people about this question, both on and off the podcast. And I’ve been watching the progress of AI on verifiable domains and thinking about what that implies for AI research itself.
I’ve now come to the view that we’re only a couple of years away, and possibly only a couple of months away, from AIs that are as good as the best humans at AI research. I’ve also come to believe that automating AI research will compress so much progress into a single year that, soon thereafter (so by 2030, but plausibly as early as next year), we’ll have AIs that are at least as good as the best human experts in every field. I know this is a wild claim, and it’s one that I myself didn’t believe even a couple of months ago. Let me walk you through how my thinking has changed.
