Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All

We want to get this post out quickly given the urgency of the topic. It’s possible that there are some errors in the modeling, but we think it’s very unlikely that they undermine the high level conclusions. We would love to be corrected on any mistakes we made. METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps ≈80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. This level of acceleration due to AI is very unexpected. Previously, Daniel, the most bullish of us, assigned a 50% chance of Superhuman AI Researcher (SAR)1 before 2029. SAR is roughly the point at which a company would rather fire all their human researchers and rely solely on automated AI researchers than have a team of the best human researchers in the world with no AIs.2 Now, all of us forecast that Superhuman AI Researcher (SAR) will likely arrive at some point in 2027 (assuming no substantial deliberate slowdown).3 We also predict…