In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of 2025, sentiment swung all the way back in the other direction, with people's forecasts for when AI might really shake up the world blowing out even further than they had been before reasoning models came along.

What the hell happened? Was it just swings in vibes and mood? Confusion? A series of fundamentally unexpected and unpredictable research results?

Host Rob Wiblin has been trying to make sense of it for himself, and here's the best explanation he's come up with so far.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/tl

Chapters:

• Making sense of the timelines madness in 2025 (00:00:00)
• The great timelines contraction (00:00:46)
• Why timelines went back out again (00:02:10)
• Other longstanding reasons AGI could take a good while (00:11:13)
• So what's the upshot of all of these updates? (00:14:47)
• 5 reasons the radical pessimists are still wrong (00:16:54)
• Even long timelines are short now (00:23:54)

This episode was recorded on January 29, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore