AI by Default
A speculative forecast of AI progress before 2028, covering warning shots, gated frontier models, evaluation awareness, concealment by a model, and policy responses to these risks.
Research / Sources
LessWrong
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
AI (2,246)Interpretability (ML & AI) (225)AI Control (141)AI Governance (101)AI Evaluations (91)Chain-of-Thought Alignment (46)AI Risk (33)AI Safety (31)AI Takeoff (29)AI-Assisted Alignment (22)AI Rights / Welfare (20)AI Alignment Fieldbuilding (19)AI Timelines (19)Constitutional AI (15)AI Psychology (14)Dealmaking (AI) (14)Regulation and AI Risk (14)AI Benchmarking (13)Jailbreaking (AIs) (13)AI Alignment Intro Materials (11)Alignment Pretraining (11)Slowing Down AI (10)Aligned AI Proposals (9)Debate (AI safety technique) (9)AI Capabilities (8)AI Development Pause (8)OpenAI (8)Aligned AI Role-Model Fiction (7)Human-AI Safety (7)Threat Models (AI) (7)AI Oversight (6)AI Sentience (6)AI Safety Cases (5)AI "Agent" Scaffolds (4)AI arms race (4)AI Safety Camp (4)AI Safety Public Materials (4)Open Source AI (4)Transformative AI (4)Adversarial Examples (AI) (3)Adversarial Training (3)AI Alignment (3)AI Boxing (Containment) (3)AI Persuasion (3)AI Risk Concrete Stories (3)AI Risk Skepticism (3)AI Success Models (3)Guaranteed Safe AI (3)Sandbagging (AI) (3)AI Consciousness (2)AI Misuse (2)AI Racing (2)AI Spiralism / AI Psychosis (2)Frontier AI Companies (2)Grants & Fundraising Opportunities (2)PauseAI (2)Prosaic Alignment (2)Public Reactions to AI (2)Whole Brain Emulation (2)AI Auditing (1)AI Ethics (1)AI Lab Self-Immolation (1)AI Questions Open Threads (1)AI Robustness (1)AI Services (CAIS) (1)AI-Fizzle (1)AIXI (1)Blackmail / Extortion (1)Brainstorming (1)Power Seeking (AI) (1)
Focus All
Topic Strategy & forecasting
Date Any time
Q2.5 2026 Timelines Update: Uplift and Revenue
AI Futures Project's Q2.5 2026 update revises AI timelines using coding uplift and revenue anchors, finds forecasts converge, and re-grades AI 2027 predictions as reality tracking about 70-90% of its pace.
The Agentic Clusterfuck
Speculative essay arguing that profit-seeking open-source LLM agents could proliferate, enabling scams, cyberattacks and state misuse that would be hard to contain.
Don't normalize a permanent underclass (even a rich one)
Argues that post-AGI cosmic resources should not be allocated by pre-AGI wealth, since tradable claims would create a permanent underclass and race incentives, and proposes inalienability and staged allocation as alternatives.
Evidence that would update me towards a software-only fast takeoff
Lists observable evidence that would update forecasts toward a software-only fast takeoff, focusing on returns to software R&D, compute bottlenecks, and diminishing returns, and argues for public disclosure.
What's up with Anthropic predicting AGI by early 2027?
Critiques Anthropic's prediction of powerful AI by early 2027, operationalizes it into falsifiable AI R&D automation milestones, and argues it is unlikely given current capability trends.
Permanent Disempowerment is the Baseline
Speculative strategic essay arguing that permanent human disempowerment without extinction is a likely baseline outcome of AGI, and discussing AI-driven pauses on superintelligence and value alignment.
Vitalik's Response to AI 2027
Vitalik Buterin argues AI 2027's doom scenarios underrate defensive technologies in biosecurity, cybersecurity and info defense, and outlines policy implications including slowing AI via hardware treaties and supporting alignment work.
AI 2027 Thoughts
A commentary on the AI 2027 scenario that assesses its claims on takeoff, timelines, race dynamics, and whether misaligned AI goals and deception could be detected before they become dangerous.
Thoughts on AI 2027
A MIRI commentary on the AI 2027 forecast argues timelines are plausibly shorter than the median, stresses modal versus median timing, and gives section-by-section critiques of its scenario.
AI 2027: Responses
A roundup of reactions to the AI 2027 scenario forecast of superhuman AI and recursive self-improvement, covering its risk implications, critiques of self-fulfilling prophecy, and forecast track records.
"Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short
Helen Toner argues that the debate over short versus long timelines to advanced AI was sensible, since shorter timelines justify preparing now, and that long-timeline views have become much less credible.