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What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? | 80,000 Hours

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Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view, calling agents “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.” He was far from alone in his whiplash. Six months ago, host Rob Wiblin recorded a video explaining why so many AI experts had longer timelines to AGI than a year earlier. By the time he clicked publish, another huge vibe shift was well underway. Evidence of AI acceleration has piled up since: While legitimately impressive, Rob isn’t entirely sold. Going through each point carefully he finds this evidence is less decisive than it looks at first glance. And key gaps remain, such as models struggling with complex, real-world tasks. He tours the odd experiments that remain our best attempts to measure that gap: vending machine simulators, an “AI Village” that organises live events, and a real cafe and shop where AI managers are left to do their best handling staff, suppliers, and government paperwork on their ow

Transcript Table of Contents 1 What the hell happened? [00:00:00] 2 Vibe shift [00:01:17] 3 Exhibit 1: AI revenue explodes [00:04:33] 4 Exhibit 2: That METR graph [00:09:54] 5 Exhibit 3: AI capabilities jump, then flatten out [00:14:57] 6 Exhibit 4: AI starts to build itself… maybe [00:17:35] 7 Exhibit 5: AI still struggles to run a business [00:23:02] 8 Exhibit 6: OpenAI makes a maths breakthrough [00:33:48] 9 Exhibit 7: Inference scaling wasn’t as big as believed [00:38:19] 10 How does that all change timelines? [00:41:41] 11 Four reasons long timelines are still possible…

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