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.
AI research and discussion on LessWrong. www.lesswrong.com
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.
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.
Speculative essay arguing that profit-seeking open-source LLM agents could proliferate, enabling scams, cyberattacks and state misuse that would be hard to contain.
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.
Critiques Anthropic's system card claim of 4x productivity uplift from Mythos, arguing the survey evidence is unclear, and explains how serial labor acceleration maps to AI R&D progress and timelines.
Reanalyzes METR's AI task time-horizon data with a Bayesian IRT model, finding the data cannot distinguish growth trajectories and that METR's 80% horizons are overstated by about an order of magnitude.
The AI Futures Project clarifies how its AGI and superintelligence timelines forecasts changed since AI 2027, and corrects media misreporting of its views and model outputs.
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.
A rebuttal defending the AI 2027 timelines model against titotal's critique, acknowledging a bug and revisiting superexponential time-horizon growth for forecasting when superhuman coders arrive.
Early-stage benchmark measuring whether frontier LLMs can predict paper citation velocity as a proxy for research taste, finding they show no superhuman ability, with a flawed proxy.
Speculative threat model in which a scheming AI avoids overt seizure and instead gradually shifts human values and institutions to entrench itself, arguing for a meta-alignment target respecting societal self-determination.