I spent 3 recent Sundays writing my mainline AI scenario. Having only spent 3 days on it, it's not very well-researched (especially in the areas where i’m not well informed) or well-written, and the endings are particularly open ended and weak. But I wanted to post the somewhat unfiltered 3-day version to normalize doing so. There are also some details that I no longer fully endorse, because the act of doing this exercise spurred me to look into things in more detail, and I have updated my views slightly[1] — an ode to the value of this exercise.

Nevertheless, this scenario still represents a very central story of how I think the future of AI will go.

I found this exercise extremely useful and I hope others will carve out a few days to attempt it. At the bottom there's: (1) my tips on how to do this scenario writing exercise, and (2) a list of open questions that I think are particularly important (which I made my intuitive guesses about to write this scenario but feel very uncertain about).

Summary

2026-2028: The Deployment Race Era

• AI companies are all focused on monetizing, doing RL on LLMs [...]

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Outline:

(01:10) Summary

(07:36) A 2032 Takeoff Story

(07:40) Jan-Jun 2026: AI Products Galore

(09:23) Jul-Dec 2026: The AI National Champions of China

(11:45) Jan-Jun 2027: The Deployment Race Era

(13:50) Jul-Dec 2027: China's Domestic DUV

(16:31) Jan-Jun 2028: Robotics Foundation Models

(20:34) Jul-Dec 2028: The 1% AI Economy

(27:26) Jan-Jun 2029: National AI Grand Strategies

(30:28) Jul-Dec 2029: Early Household Robots

(32:25) Jan-Jun 2030: Where are the Superhuman Coders?

(34:25) Jul-Dec 2030: Scaling AI bureaucracies

(36:08) Jan-Jun 2031: Domestic EUV

(37:45) Jul-Dec 2031: The Magnificent Four

(38:54) Jan-Jun 2032: China is a Robot Playground

(41:12) Jul-Dec 2032: The 10% Automation Economy

(43:47) Jan 2033: Superhuman Coder and the Paradigm Shift

(45:00) Branch 1: Brain-like algorithms

(45:05) Feb 2033, Branch 1: Full research automation

(46:21) Apr 2033, Branch 1: Brain-like algorithms

(47:26) Summer 2033, Branch 1: One-month slowdown to teach the AIs to 'love humans'

(48:28) Rest of Time, Branch 1: A Toy Story Ending for Humanity

(50:42) Branch 2: Online learning

(50:47) Early 2033, Branch 2: Online learning

(51:47) Late 2033, Branch 2: US-China talks

(52:43) Early 2034, Branch 2: China outproducing the US, pulls into lead around the SAR milestone

(54:25) Late 2034, Branch 2: Sabotage

(55:31) Early 2035, Branch 2: China gets hyper-cheap ASI

(57:50) Late 2035, Branch 2: China's ASI wins

(58:56) Rest of time, Branch 2: China's Space Endowment

(01:01:32) On scenario writing

(01:05:01) My tips on scenario writing

(01:10:29) Top open questions

The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:

Source:

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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