Back in June 2023, Soroush Pour and I discussed AI timelines on his podcast, The AGI Show. The biggest difference between us was that I think “machines more intelligent than people are likely to be developed within a few years”, and he thinks that it's unlikely to happen for at least a few decades.[1]

We haven’t really resolved our disagreement on this prediction in the year since, so I thought I would write up my main reasons for thinking we’re so close to superintelligence, and why the various arguments made by Soroush (and separately by Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor) aren’t persuasive to me.

Part 1 - Why I Think We Are Close

Empirically

You can pick pretty much any trend relating to AI & computation, and it looks like this:[2]

We keep coming up with new benchmarks, and they keep getting saturated. While there are still [...]

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