Episode Details

This is a link post.

Could we have human-level AI within the next few decades? For a long time, many people have dismissed this idea as armchair speculation. In their view, we shouldn’t ground our beliefs about transformative technologies in vague hunches and fragile multi-step arguments. We need more solid evidence, like clear empirical trends. We need to be epistemically conservative.

I have some conservative instincts myself, but I’m not sure they favour long AI timelines anymore. That might have been the case ten or even five years ago, but things have changed.

Bio Anchors

It's no accident that the AI timelines debate long lacked empirical grounding. While climate change has a natural metric – temperature – AI progress doesn’t. As a result, forecasts have often relied on intuition.

But in recent years, some researchers have tried to put timeline forecasting on a firmer empirical footing. One attempt that received plenty of attention was Ajeya Cotra's Bio Anchors report (2020), which plotted compute projections against estimates of the human brain's compute usage. The model produced multiple forecasts of when it would become feasible to train transformative AI, with a median date around 2052.

Bio Anchors was an impressive research effort [...]

---

Outline:

(00:47) Bio Anchors

(02:17) Capability benchmarks

(03:38) Revenue growth

(04:50) Expert surveys

---

First published:
May 7th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qtfX67cC4tij2zoKC/the-tables-have-turned-on-ai-sceptics

Linkpost URL:
https://www.update.news/p/the-tables-have-turned-on-ai-sceptics

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---