Comment by dreambuffer

So, this is not quite right: Alexander contributed to the report, but his personal opinion is more like the mid-2030s[1]. Freddie feels like this is him backing down from the original statement, but in fact he said this at the time the report was published, and in fact pointed out a graf below the quote that Freddie claims does tie him to 2027:

> 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. We keep the scenario centered around 2027 because it’s still his modal prediction (and because it would be annoying to change). Other members of the team (including me) have medians later in the 2020s or early 2030s, and also think automation will progress more slowly. So maybe think of this as a vision of what an 80th percentile fast scenario looks like - not our precise median, but also not something we feel safe ruling out. [2]

I don't think this changes your observation that he is "personally invested" (i.e. believes this trendline will continue), but I'm pretty sure when AGI doesn't appear in 2027, many people will believe that this invalidates the arguments being made here (or in the report). The actual report was intended to give a feel for what a near-future "disaster" AGI scenario, and settled on a date to give that some concrete immediacy. The collective review that gave that as a possible, but not inevitable date is still ongoing (they originally pushed their best estimate out a bit further, but now they think, judging by the goals that are being hit, their scenario was a little too conservative). [3]

[1] https://freddiedeboer.substack.com/p/im-offering-scott-alexa... [2] https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/introducing-ai-2027 [3] https://blog.aifutures.org/p/grading-ai-2027s-2025-predictio...

Mind you, he is only personally invested insofar as he's staked his reputation on it. Throughout his writing, he expresses the same point over and over again: desperately wants AI to slow down, advocates for politics that would slow it down, and most likely nothing would bring him greater peace than to see a sigmoid curve appear.

This is incorrect as written. The author contributed writing to AI-2027 but distanced himself from the underlying model. That model had 2027 as the modal year of AGI, not median or mean. The authors of that model revised it to a later date shortly after and (if I recall correctly) have since done so again.

It is broadly true that Scott believes that AGI will come in the near future and from LLMs, although his reputation runs a ways deeper than that.

Ok, but you can just look at the METR curve. Mythos saturated the 50% time horizon. The 80% is now at 3 hours. The rate of progress is accelerating not slowing down. There’s no indication yet that this is a sigmoid!

AGI has become such a meaningless nondescript term, arguing when or how it is here has become pointless. Even OpenAI caved in and removed their AGI clause from their contract with Microsoft because they weren't fully sure that we are not there yet. The original ARC AGI was hailed as proof that AGI is not here yet, but now that ARC 1 and 2 got saturated, noone wanted to consider that perhaps we crossed the point where average humans are getting left behind. Frontier models are primarily limited by context and modality at this point, not by intelligence.

> FYI: The author has predicted that "AGI" will be here in 1-2 years and has staked his public reputation on it. He is personally invested in trendlines being lindy rather than sigmoid.

I mean, that's called "having an opinion".

He only has 1.5 more months. If he's wrong he needs to own it. Same for Eliezer Yudkowsky. But these people have too much riding on their brands. No one has the courage to fess up to being wrong. Given how many podcasts he and others have been on professing this belief, it will be hard to just pretend otherwise.