(2025-04-03) Alexander Introducing Ai2027

Scott Alexander: Introducing AI 2027. In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called “What 2026 Looks Like”, where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years.

But even he didn’t expect what happened next.
He got it all right.

Okay, not literally all. The US restricted chip exports to China in late 2022, not mid-2024. AI first beat humans at Diplomacy in late 2022, not 2025. And of course the mid-2025 to 2026 period remains to be seen. But to put its errors in context, Daniel’s document was written two years before ChatGPT existed.

I wasn’t the only one who noticed. A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly.

Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel

Since October, I’ve been volunteering part-time, doing some writing and publicity work

The summary: we think that 2025 and 2026 will see gradually improving AI agents. In 2027, coding agents will finally be good enough to substantially boost AI R&D itself, causing an intelligence explosion that plows through the human level sometime in mid-2027 and reaches superintelligence by early 2028

If AI is misaligned, it could move against humans as early as 2030 (ie after it’s automated enough of the economy to survive without us). If it gets aligned successfully, then by default power concentrates in a double-digit number of tech oligarchs and US executive branch members; this group is too divided to be crushingly dictatorial, but its reign could still fairly be described as technofeudalism. Humanity starts colonizing space at the very end of the 2020s / early 2030s.

Do we really think things will move this fast? Sort of no - between the beginning of the project last summer and the present, Daniel’s median for the intelligence explosion shifted from 2027 to 2028.
Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly.