Episode Details

I now consider it plausible that some form of recursive self-improvement is imminent, and that we may be on track for superintelligence by Christmas of this year if racing continues.

This is substantially faster than any forecast, including ones like AI 2027 that were considered outrageously fast a year ago. It is faster than I myself expected even a week ago. I don't work at a scaling lab. I don't know more than is public knowledge.

Let me be perfectly clear: what I am saying is absolutely nuts. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. I claim we have now received said evidence and you should update accordingly.

FOOM should probably should be your *default expectation*.

People have strong status quo bias. Your default expectation should be that things will radically speed up.

We are not at the ceiling of intelligence.

We should probably expect the transition to superintelligence to be incredibly fast.

RSI is a positive feedback loop, so it is inherently (hyper)exponential. Everything is an S-curve eventually, but nothing suggests the ceiling is anywhere near human level, or that it happens at a human timescale.

AI is [...]

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Outline:

(01:08) FOOM should probably should be your *default expectation*.

(01:44) AI is capable of revolutionary advances in mathematics. Machine learning research is not different in kind.

(03:16) The speed of AI progress continues to be underestimated; by superforecasters and even by the researchers themselves.

(05:07) Internal models are significantly ahead of released ones;

(06:08) Intuitions about timing from pre-training runs are misleading since most progress comes from RL, unhobbling and algorithmic innovations

(06:29) Enter the Swarm

(07:04) Anthropic's own report states it has 30,000 agents running concurrently, and Claude has completely taken over 26% of all R&D.

The original text contained 3 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 17th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/LJbKwctaioqp2Hi4b/superintelligence-this-christmas

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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