"Long" timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short

Welcome to Rising Tide! I’m publishing 3 posts this week to celebrate the launch of this Substack—this is post #1. New posts will be more intermittent after this week. Subscribe to get them straight in your inbox: It used to be a bold claim, requiring strong evidence, to argue that we might see anything like human-level AI any time in the first half of the 21st century. This 2016 post, for instance, spends 8,500 words justifying the claim that there is a greater than 10% chance of advanced AI being developed by 2036. (Arguments about timelines typically refer to “timelines to AGI,” but throughout this post I’ll mostly refer to “advanced AI” or “human-level AI” rather than “AGI.” In my view, “AGI” as a term of art tends to confuse more than it clarifies, since different experts use it in such different ways.1 So the fact that “human-level AI” sounds vaguer than “AGI” is a feature, not a bug—it naturally invites reactions of “human-level at what?” and “how are we measuring that?” and “is

Welcome to Rising Tide! I’m publishing 3 posts this week to celebrate the launch of this Substack—this is post #1. New posts will be more intermittent after this week. Subscribe to get them straight in your inbox: It used to be a bold claim, requiring strong evidence, to argue that we might see anything like human-level AI any time in the first half of the 21st century. This 2016 post, for instance, spends 8,500 words justifying the claim that there is a greater than 10% chance of advanced AI being developed by 2036. (Arguments about timelines typically refer to “timelines to AGI,” but through