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Here's an argument for short timelines that I take seriously:
- Anthropic revenue has increased by 10x/yr for the last 3 years. At EOY 2025 it was 10B. Maybe it will keep increasing at this rate.
- The revenue of the leading AI company will be between 100B/yr and 10T/yr when AGI is achieved. (Why not lower? Maybe but AGI this year seems unlikely. Why not higher? If one companies revenue is on the order of 10% of current wGDP, then the whole AI industry is probably 50-100% of current wGDP, which seems like you probably have AGI by then).
- Therefore, AGI will be built sometime between EOY 2026 (when Ant hits 100B on current trends) and EOY 2028 (when Ant hits 10T on current trends).
I think I feel better about (2) then basically any other way of getting an anchor on when AGI will be built because it much directly tracks real world impacts of AI, whereas e.g. it seems really difficult to get any sort of confidence on what oom of effective flops or benchmark score corresponds to AGI.
(1) still seems dubious to me, I think revenue trends will probably slow. But I don't know when and I could totally imagine them continuing straight to AGI.
(What exactly do I mean by AGI? I don't think it matters much here, I think this argument goes through pretty well for all reasonable definitions of AGI but lets say I mean that AI R&D would slow down more if you removed the AIs than if you removed the humans).
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Continuation of this trend already requires some form of TAI. The method of how AI systems generate value has to radically change. Otherwise who would pay so much money for them?
It's kinda like making similar argument about parameter numbers and saying "and if it's more than ... parameters, it means Earth surface is all computronium, so obviously AGI was achieved".
I already mostly believe in the logical implication "no AGI -> break of trends", so "no break of trends -> AGI" is not an additional argument.
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I think those examples actually reinforce Josh's point. NVIDIA growth is also from AI. Zoom and Moderna grew because of COVID creating a ginormous demand shock, yet even then, their growth at its peak was slower than Anthropic's growth despite them starting from a smaller revenue level and therefore it being inherently easier for them to grow. So... unless you can dig up better examples, it seems like Anthropic's Q1 2026 growth is literally the most impressive growth of any company in history? And this is despite the fact that there's no COVID-equivalent for AI; there's no unusual circumstance that created a huge temporary demand shock, instead, it's just that they made their products better.