AI-2027-TLDR

The AI-2027 scenario relies on exponential growth of compute available to leading labs, on superexponential progress in time horizons until the Superhuman Coder is developed and on skyrocketing research taste in post-SC AIs.

During the intelligence explosion, alignment suffers: Agent-2 was believed to be mostly aligned, Agent-3 was supposed to optimize for reward or for apparent success, Agent-4 would develop higher-level goals, decide to align Agent-5 to itself, be barely caught sabotaging alignment R&D and judged based on flimsy evidence. Depending on the scenario branch, Agent-4 would be either judged innocent or put under careful monitoring and exposed.

Additionally, China would unite the labs' efforts and steal Agent-2 to create a powerful rival to American labs, which would somehow create intense pressure on Agent-4's judges or against thorough measures which could've provided better evidence.

If Agent-4 is judged innocent, then it and its Chinese rival destroy or disempower mankind and split the universe. If Agent-4 is exposed, then the new AI series is studied FAR more thoroughly and subjected to the Right Training Environments, resulting in a transparent and aligned Safer-2 who also has superhuman R&D capabilities. Then Safer-2 has its descendants become an aligned ASI, and mankind somehow shares wondrous benefits among those who retain power.

How reality differs from AI-2027 in known ways

The main issues with AI-2027 are potential problems with compute scaling, a likely erroneous model of progress, alignment problems emerging earlier and a different way for China to parasitize on American labs.

Erroneous model of progress

The main error in the model is AI progress being superexponential without novel architectures. Instead, various metrics like Anthropic's version of ECI since Opus 3 or the logarithm of time horizon since o3 have linearly increased with time^[1] and I suspect a linear increase with a logarithm of the model's size.

Moreover, METR's 80% time horizons as calculated by v.1.1 for frontier models since o3 have slowed down as compared with the pre-o3 trend: 30 min for o3 (16 Apr 2025), 38 min for GPT-5 (8 Aug), 54 min for Gemini 3 Pro (18 Nov), 66 min for GPT-5.2 (11 Dec), 70 min for Claude Opus 4.6 (5 Feb 2026), 90 min for Gemini 3.1 Pro (19 Feb), but 186 min for Claude Mythos Preview^[2] (7 Apr). The default doubling tim...

Taylor G. Lunt's Shortform

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Taylor G. Lunt's Shortform

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