2027 Intelligence Explosion: Month-by-Month Model — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo
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Today, I have the great pleasure of chatting with Scott Alexander and Daniel Cocotello. Scott is, of course, the author of the blog, Slate Sar Codex, AstralCodex 10 Now. It's actually been a, as you know, a big bucket list item of mine to get you on the podcast. So this is also the first podcast we've ever done. Right? Yes. And then Daniel is the director of the AI Futures project, and you have both just launched today something called AI twenty twenty seven. So what is this?
Yeah. AI twenty twenty seven is our scenario trying to forecast the next few years of AI progress. We're trying to do two things here. First of all is we just want to have a concrete scenario at all. So you have all these people, Sam Altman, Dario Almodai, Elon Musk saying, gonna have AGI in three years, superintelligence in five years. And people just think that's crazy because right now we have chatbots that's able to do, like, a Google search, not much more than that in a lot of ways. And so people ask, how is it going to be AGI in three years? What we wanted to do is provide a story, provi
think you're hyping up a little bit too much. Yes. I do recommend people, go read the old thing I did, which was a blog post. I think think it got a bunch of stuff right, a bunch of stuff wrong, but overall held up pretty well and inspired me to, like, try again and do a better version of it.
I think read the document and decide which of
us is right. Another related thing too is that, it was going to the original thing was not supposed to end in 2026. It was supposed to go all the way through the exciting stuff. Right? Because everyone's talking about, like, what about AGI? What about superintelligence? Like, what would that even look like? So I was trying to sort of, like, step by step work my way from where we were at the time until things happen and then see what they look like. But I basically chickened out when I got to 2027 because things were starting to happen and the That's right. Automation loop was starting to take
And then, Scott, how did you get involved in this project? I
was asked to help with the writing, and I was already somewhat familiar with the people on the project, and many of them were kinda my heroes. So Daniel, I knew both because I'd written a blog post about his opinions before. I knew about his what 2026 looks like, which was amazing. And, also, he had pretty recently made the national news for having when he quit OpenAI, they told him he had to sign a nondisparagement agreement where they would claw back his stock options, and he refused, which they weren't prepared for. It started a major news story, a scandal that ended up with OpenAI agreeing
that. Yeah. I I've
probably changed my mind towards, against, towards, against intelligence explosion, like, three, four times in the conversations I've had in the lead up in talking to you and then, like, coming up with a trying to come up with a rebuttal or something.
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