Timelines to AGI
How long do people expect it will take for AGI or superintelligent AI to be developed?
- Daniel Kokotajlo: 15% chance in 2024
- Metaculus 25% Weak AGI estimate: February 2025
- David Shapiro: 2026
- Elon Musk (X.ai, Tesla): before 2026 (“discover new physics or invent new technology”)
- Jensen Huang: 2028 (a computer that can complete tests which reflect basic intelligence that’s “fairly competitive” to that of a normal human.)
- Sam Altman (CEO OpenAI): could be reached sometime in the next four or five years
- Yoshua Bengio (Turing award winner): 2028 to 2043, 90% confidence interval . Also asks himself: “And what if it was, indeed, just a few years? ”
- Geoffrey Hinton (Turing award winner): 2028 to 2053 (he first thought it would take “at least” till 2070)
- Gary Marcus (Cognitiv): not before 2026
Our take
Prediction is very difficult, especially if it’s about the future. Past expert AI predictions turned out to have been overly optimistic.
In some ways AI models are already superhuman, so we could be very close to models with dangerous capabilities . Current state of the art AI models have an IQ of >130, speak 20 languages, write code in most programming languages, and can explain quantum mechanics in 18th-century German poetry. Innovation is hard to predict, and important innovations could happen at any time.
Since we’re risking human extinction, we should err on the side of caution and act as if AGI could be developed in the next few months .