AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel Kokotajlo

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:00)
Today, I have the great pleasure of chatting with Scott Alexander and Daniel Kokotajlo. Scott is, of course, the author of the blog SlateStar Codex, Astral Codex 10 Now. It's actually been, as you know, a big bucket list item of mine to get you on the podcast. So this is all the first podcasts we've ever done, right?

**Scott Alexander** (0:18)
Yes.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (0:19)
And then Daniel is the director of the AI Futures Project. And you have both just launched today something called AI 2027 So what is this?

**Scott Alexander** (0:30)
Yeah. AI 2027 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 Amadei, Elon Musk saying, we're going to 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, provide the transitional fossils. So start right now, go up to 2027 when there's AGI, 2028 when there's potentially superintelligence, show on a month-by-month level what happened. Kind of in fiction writing terms, make it feel earned. So that's the easy part. The hard part is we also want to be right. So we're trying to forecast how things are going to go, what speed they're going to go at. We know that in general, the median outcome for a forecast like this is being totally humiliated when everything goes completely differently, and if you read our scenario, you're definitely not going to expect us to be the exception to that trend. The thing that gives me optimism is Daniel, back in 2021, wrote kind of the prequel to this scenario called What 2026 Looks Like. It's his forecast for the next five years of AI progress. He got it almost exactly right. Like, you should stop this podcast right now. You should go and read this document. It's amazing. Kind of looks like you asked Chat GPT summarize the past five years of AI progress. And you got something with a couple of hallucinations, but basically well-intentioned and correct. So when Daniel said he was doing this sequel, I was very excited.
Really wanted to see where it was going. It goes to some pretty crazy places, and I'm excited to talk about it more today.

**Daniel Kokotajlo** (2:31)
I 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 I got a bunch of stuff right, a bunch of stuff wrong, but overall held up pretty well, and inspired me to try again and do a better version of it.

**Scott Alexander** (2:44)
I think read the document and decide which of us is right.

**Daniel Kokotajlo** (2:48)
Another related thing too is that the original thing was not supposed to end in 2026, it was supposed to go all the way through the exciting stuff, because everyone's talking about what about AGI, what about superintelligence, what would that even look like? So I was trying to 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 automation loop was starting to take off, and it was just so confusing, and there was so much uncertainty. So I basically just deleted the last chapter, and published what I had up until that point, and that was the blog post.

**Dwarkesh Patel** (3:27)
Okay. Then Scott, how did you get involved in this project?

**Scott Alexander** (3:29)
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 kind of my heroes. So Daniel, I knew both because I had 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 non-disparagement agreement, or 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 they were no longer going to subject employees to that restriction. So, people talk a lot about how it's hard to trust anyone in AI because they all have so much money invested in the hype and getting their stock options better. And Dadila had like just attempted to sacrifice millions of dollars in order to say what he believed, which to me was this incredibly strong sign of honesty and competence. And I was like, how can I say no to this person? Everyone else on the team also extremely impressive. Eli Lifeland, who's a member of Samotsveti, the world's top forecasting team. He has won like the top forecasting competition, plausibly described as just the best forecaster in the world, at least by these really technical measures that people use in the super forecasting committee. Thomas Larson, Jonas Vollmer, both really amazing people who have done great work in AI before. I was really excited to get to work with this superstar team. I have always wanted to get more involved in the actual attempt to make AI go well. Right now, I just write about it. I think writing about it is important.