I feel like this scenario somewhat overplays how easily China is able to push over the U.S with their industrial lead (in much the same way that I feel a lot of other AI predictions, a la Situational Awareness, overplay the U.S's position when it takes the lead).
The ASI directs successful sabotage on the US training runs to keep them from training their own ASI, and in response the US makes threats of kinetic strikes. China doesn’t back down at this because its ASI has created a robust air defense system spanning all of China that scales to ICBMs.
Most of my skepticism has to do with my belief that future AI technologies are going to allow for the development of extremely powerful asymmetric weapons, and that this will negate most of the advantage from having a giant industrial lead (even if you are the first to set off your industrial explosion). Nuclear weapons are a clear example of this: even if you cloud the sky with interceptors, you can negate all of that defensive investment through simple strategies like putting your nuke in a shipping container and docking it next to Beijing/Washington. Defensive investment is a poor strategy for trying to outmatch offense-dominant technology.
Even more importantly, the leading country needs to be robustly defense dominant against all possible asymmetric weapons. From the perspective of MAD, it doesn't matter if your supply chains can protect you against nukes if they can't also protect you against alternative threats like targeted bioweapons. And if the loser is really desperate, they can also make it even harder to defend through employing fail-deadly tools like mirror life or an intentionally misaligned superintelligence. Otherwise, the other side (the U.S in this example) is able to limit the extent of your sabotage and buy time with deterrence, which they can use to build out their own fully-optimized ASI.[1] I'd imagine that the U.S could use it's substantially worse, but still superhuman AIs to develop several of these cheap and highly destructive weapons, and then commit to retaliating with them as leverage.
At that point, even if China has the industrial lead, we still end up in a bipolar world dominated by the promise of MAD between the two parties, with each country needing to respect what the other does in their own sphere of influence.
A historical example I often use for this is the U.S refusal to invade North Korea in 1994, and it's subsequent acquisition of nuclear weapons. Although the U.S was and is orders of magnitude more superior conventionally, once Pyongyang had reached a level of military sophistication with regular artillery to guarantee that they could destroy Seoul at a moment's notice, the immediate costs became too high to justify a military operation to make sure that their enrichment facilities were destroyed. Instead you ended up with an ineffective diplomatic compromise, which was later subverted at the whim of the North Korean government.
Even though Seoul was able to invest enough in the following decades to become mostly secure against a regular artillery strike, it doesn't matter: North Korea bought enough time to get their nukes online.
Trillions in revenue is more plausible if continual learning is somewhat working soon and gradually getting better, rather than mostly absent until it's unlocked in 2033. With gradual improvement in continual learning, AGI timelines might get more like gradual disempowerment timelines, no clear thresholds until it's suddenly already been too late for a while.
Interesting read, however I am a bit surprised by how you treat power, with US at 600GW and China 5* more. Similar things are often quoted in mainstream media and I think they are missing the point. Power seems to be relevant only in terms of supplying AI compute, and possibly robotics, and only then IF it is a constraint.
However to be basic calc show it should not be. For example say in 2030 we get a large compute increase with 50 million H100 equivalent per year produced, up from ~3 million eq in 2025. This would require ~1KW extra each at say ~50GW total including infrastructure.
Now this may seem like a lot, but if we compute the cost per GPU, then if a chip requiring 1KW costs $20K, then the costs to power it with solar/battery are far less. Lets say the solar/data center are in Texas with a solar capacity factor of 20%. To power it almost 24/7 from solar and batteries requires about 5KW of panels, and say 18kWh of batteries. The average prices of solar panels are <10c per watt, so just $500 for the panels. At scale, batteries are heading below $200 per kWh so this is $3600. This is a lot less than the cost of the chip. Solar panels and batteries are commodities so even if China does produce more than USA, it cannot stop them from being used by anyone worldwide.
Power consumption is only relevant if it is the limiting factor in building data centers - the installed capacities of large countries don't apply. Having an existing large capacity is a potential advantage, but only if the opposing country can't build their data center because this stops them.
I also strongly expect branch 1, where the new algorithm is a lot more power efficient suddenly anyway.
Economically, I agree with your calculations on power. However, the US has worked itself into a corner where we frequently tie our own hands, refusing to let the people who want to build the energy production facilities do so where they're needed on anything like a reasonable timescale.
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 to make products, and this is ultimately data bottlenecked, so it becomes a ‘deployment race’ because having more users/deployment gets you more money, more compute and more data. Some lean towards B2C (through search, social media, online shopping, etc.) and others lean towards B2B (enterprise agent plans)
China is 15y behind in lithography but wakes up much harder on indigenizing lithography once they realize they are falling behind and their chips are bad. They start moving at 2x the speed of ASML history.
2028-2030: The 1% AI Economy
Architecture innovations help make AIs more useful and reliable
AI starts becoming a top 4 social issue for many
Household robots enter their ‘Waymo-2025’ phase in reliability and adoption
China 5x ahead in energy, talent and robots but 5x behind in capital and compute.
China cracks mass-production-capable immersion DUV.
2030-2032: The 10% AI Economy
‘Magnificent 4’, US tech giants concentrate into fewer AI winners and have >$10T market caps
AI is top social issue, 7-8% unemployment
Robots doing several basic physical service jobs
China cracks mass-production-capable EUV
2032 Branching point
Superhuman Coder milestone (SC) is reached, and the story branches based on takeoff speed: fast (data efficient, brain-like algorithms) and slow (continual learning, data bound).
Major disclaimer: In one branch the US wins but eventually loses control over the AIs, and in the other China wins but maintains control. This is not because I think China is any more likely to prevent AI takeover a priori. Rather its downstream of correlations with takeoff speeds, my full explanation here:[2]
Fast takeoff branch: Brain-like algorithms
After the SC milestone is achieved, the AIs already have very good research taste, and one more month of improvements leads to full AI research automation.
The AI helps invent a new algorithmic paradigm: Highly data efficient brain-like algorithms.
The US is in lead and does Plan C,[3] the company is in charge of how fast to go and the USG not completely in the dark but pretty uninformed about what is going on at the companies.
Recursive self improvement happens very fast, reaching ASI in a few months.
The alignment strategy is to train in a love for humans. This somewhat succeeds but mostly fails, and the AI mainly has some very weird reward correlates and proxies, but is also susceptible to value drift.
Humans become like the Toy Story toys, AI keeps them around (on earth) because they are fond of them, but soon forget about us and build up space tech and go out turning the rest of the universe into a weird optimal wire-heading mesh, 100y or so later value drift enough to come back and turn our solar system into the wire-heading mesh too (i.e., ‘throw us out’).
Slow takeoff branch: Continual learning
SC achieved but is 18 months or so away from ASI by default
There is a new paradigm which is online learning based, so it is quite data bottlenecked, and research taste is very important.
China edges into the lead due to outproducing compute (largely by outproducing them on robots) and out-deploying the US, and has more total quality adjusted research taste (5x more researchers in sheer quantity, 2x more quality adjusted)
They were already centralized anyway, and the US sabotages them hard, leading to a year or so of back and forth sabotage that escalates into a drone/robot centric war that China wins due to industrially exploding harder than the US, including in compute production.
By the end China has ASI sooner and undermines nuclear MAD before war escalates to nuclear.
China aligns AI to CCP values
China essentially turns Earth into a museum and terraforms mars. It lets other countries including the US keep their land.
China starts expanding into space, owns our solar system and takes 95% of the galaxies. There is a mild cult of personality around CCP leader but mostly this isn’t enforced, everyone has bigger fish to fry exploring space.
They donates 5% of galaxies to the rest of the world’s population, incl. some US citizens and implement basic rights, including banning nasty stuff like slavery and torture.
They punish some US war generals and people they deem acted recklessly/dangerously/unethically in the ‘before times’ but it’s capped upside based (they miss out on galaxies) and not downside based.
[Daniel said the following about this ending and I agree with him: “IDK about the ending, I think it’s plausible and maybe the modal outcome, plus I think it’s the thing to hope for. But boy am I quite worried about much worse outcomes.” To emphasize, this is tentatively my (Romeo’s) ~modal view on what that China does with an ASI-enabled DSA, but it could look much worse and that is scary. I think it is important to emphasize though that believing in a much worse ending being more likely probably requires believing something adjacent to “the leaders controlling the aligned Chinese ASI terminally value suffering,” which doesn’t seem that likely to me a priori.]
The whiteboard I used to plan out the timeline.
A 2032 Takeoff Story
Jan-Jun 2026: AI Products Galore
In the latter half of 2025, US AI companies focused on using RLVR (reinforcement learning with verifiable rewards) to make super-products out of their AI models. Three or four leading companies are emerging as winners with massive revenue growth, and fit in two major categories, those that prioritized consumer applications (B2C) and those that prioritized enterprise applications (B2B).
The Consumer Giants (B2C)
These companies have built SuperApps. Think ChatGPT but hyper-monetized, integrated with shopping websites and ads for free users.
The Enterprise Giants (B2B)
These companies have built Mega-Enterprise-Plans. Think Claude Code reliability and usefulness but for everything on a computer. Docs, Sheets, Slides, Search, etc. These are still unreliable, and – just like Claude + Cursor Pro in 2025 – it’s actually pretty unclear if it even makes people more productive overall, but everyone is on it and everyone is hooked.
Most companies don’t fit cleanly into only one of these categories, i.e., some have done a pretty even mixture of both, but those that pushed harder on a single one have concentrated a lot of the market share. Between the top 4 US AI companies, their combined AI-only revenues approach $100B annualized revenue (up 4x from mid-2025), almost 0.1% of World GDP.
Jul-Dec 2026: The AI National Champions of China
China is increasingly worried about being left behind in AI but the Politurbo doesn’t have a confident understanding of what they should do. They see US AI companies benefitting from a snowball effect of more money → better AIs → more money, in a cycle they worry they may never be able to catch up to.
The mainstream position had been that the buildout of industrial capacity and electricity would win out in the long term. But with US AI companies booming, they worry their mounting capital and compute advantage might win out.
In 2025, they compelled companies to start using domestic AI chips, effectively banning US AI chip imports. What changes by late 2026 is that after a year of their AI companies facing bugs upon bugs and trying to build up CUDA-like software from scratch, and a growing understanding of how much more cost and power efficient western chips are, they realize just how far behind their domestic AI stack is.
This spurs China to double down on subsidizing their domestic supply chain, across chip designers, chip manufacturers, and semiconductor equipment companies, increasing government spending from a run rate of around $40B/year in 2025 (1% of the national budget) to $120B/year (3% of the national budget).
This effectively creates a series of AI National Champions with near-blank-cheques across their AI chip supply chain:
SME Equipment and Lithography: NAURA, AMEC, SMEE, SiCarrier
Memory: CXMT, YMTC
Chip design: Huawei, Cambricon
Chip manufacturing: SMIC, Huawei
Even without the step up in subsidies, these companies were growing fast and making speedy progress. In the most important area where China is lagging (photolithography), they also get increased prioritization from state espionage to carry out cyber attacks on the Dutch leader ASML. With the government subsidies they are also able to poach increasing amounts of talent from Taiwanese, Japanese and Korean companies by offering mega salary packages.
Jan-Jun 2027: The Deployment Race Era
There is a snowball effect happening in the US AI ecosystem – and the effect is two-fold. Better AI products have led to more money, which leads to all the usual benefits of being able to buy more inputs (compute and labor) to build even better AI products. But there’s an additional, more powerful feedback loop happening, which is that better AI products means more users, and more users means more feedback data for training future models on – a resource companies are increasingly bottlenecked on in the RL product paradigm.
If you have 100 times more users on your AI agent, you can collect 100 times more positive or negative feedback data from all aspects of the user’s use of your app – what they say while giving instructions, their tone, whether they end up changing something later – all sorts of juicy data, and it is becoming worthwhile to filter this data and use it to train into the next versions. Some users navigate three pages into the settings menu to toggle the “off” button for letting the companies train on this data, but that’s a tiny minority of users.
It’s not a ‘first-to-market takes all’ dynamic – many early startup AI agents (and for that matter all kinds of first-to-market AI apps) got totally left behind. Instead it’s a game amongst the AI company giants (the ones with enough resources to make use of the swaths of data), and more of a ‘first-to-100-million users takes all’ dynamic – once you hit a critical threshold of being the most popular app in a specific domain, the snowball effect from the user data is so strong that it is hard for anyone else to catch up.
The AI companies had seen this dynamic coming and are in a deployment race. This motivates companies to spread out a network of smaller inference-optimized datacenters across the world to have low latency and high throughput to as many large markets as possible. Mostly the deployment data is used in product-improvement focused RL, but the AI companies are also exploring how to leverage the data to make their frontier AIs more generally intelligent.
Jul-Dec 2027: China’s Domestic DUV
China’s lithography efforts have cracked reliable mass production of 7nm-capable DUV (deep ultraviolet lithography), allowing them to independently make US-2020-level chips en-masse.
In 2023, China’s Shanghai Micro Electronics Equipment (SMEE) had announced a 28nm-class Deep Ultraviolet (DUV) lithography tool (the SSA/800-10W), 21 years after they first started working on lithography in 2002. This is a milestone the Dutch company ASML had achieved in 2008, 24 years after their founding date.
Despite the lack of reports of volume production using SMEE systems, TSMC also didn’t use the 28nm-class Dutch machines until 3 years later in 2011. In other words, as of 2023, China was probably around 15 years behind ASML in photolithography.
With the benefit of being able to pull apart ASML DUV machines, hiring former employees of ASML and its suppliers, “knowing the golden path,” multiple public accounts of cyberattacks (2023, 2025), and the more recent spending boost, China is now moving through the lithography tech tree twice as fast as ASML did. ASML only spent around $30B (inflation adjusted) on R&D in total from 2000 through 2024, and around 300,000 employee-years. There are now 2 separate lithography efforts in China each spending north of $10B/yr with about 10,000 employees. So by 2027, they have reached the milestone of mass production with 7nm-capable DUV machines, around 13 years behind ASML. At this pace, they are on track for 5-nm capable EUV in 4 years.
Side note: After writing this time period, I came across these relevant Metaculus markets, which seem to agree with these rough lithography timelines being plausible. Nevertheless, I think I have also updated my lithography timelines longer than this scenario depicts after talking to some experts. It’s closer to my 30th percentile now, no longer 50th.
Jan-Jun 2028: Robotics Foundation Models
Robotics had long suffered from a lack of cheap, scalable, quality training data. AI world models built off of physics-realistic video generation have changed this in 2028 and are allowing techniques like Nvidia’s R2D2 (training robots in simulated environments) to make big leaps.
In mid-2025 the best AI world model simulator was Google DeepMind’s Genie 3 which could generate worlds on the fly for multiple minutes at 720p, but it was very expensive and had shaky physics. Genie 6 (and some competitor models) drop in late 2027, and they can generate worlds in real time for multiple hours, with very good physics all while being pretty cheap. Multiple companies are not too far behind this level of world model generation, including some Chinese companies. [Side note: I have since updated towards this not being the main way they will scale data, I now think these other 3 alternatives are all more plausible: (1) creation of non-video simulated environments, like Waymo did for driving, but sped up by AI coding (2) paying large numbers of humans to do physical tasks wearing cameras and sensors like Waymo’s Project Go-Big, (3) Warehouses of lots of robots doing physical tasks that are evaluated by multimodal LLMs. E.g., Nonsense Factory)]
In 2025, the robotics autonomy levels of autonomy had reached ubiquitous deployment of scripted motion (level 0) robots in factory floors. Intelligent pick and place robots (level 1) were rolling out in places like Amazon’s warehouses. Autonomous mobility robots (level 2) had seen some very impressive prototypes, and low skill manipulation robots (level 3) were also starting to see some impressive demos (like laundry folding and doing dishes) but these were pretty cherry-picked (specific, short tasks) so this domain was still largely in R&D. Finally higher skill robots for force-dependent tasks (level 4) like plumbing, or electrician tasks, were very far away on the horizon.
By 2028, intelligent pick and place has become ubiquitous in factories, and autonomous mobility robots have also rolled out to many applications. Low skill manipulation robots have also now seen impressive general long-horizon demos (e.g., reliably, skillfully, and quickly doing hours worth of diverse tasks around a house), and some companies have started seriously working on prototyping robots to do high skill complex tasks.
With the data bottleneck unlocked, much of the robotics progress has been made with foundation models rapidly scaling up due to the 100x compute overhang created by language models. Over the course of a year robotics foundation models basically close this gap entirely, so parameter counts, context lengths and data have all seen a huge one-time jump in the past year.
The robotics progress is still not yet felt or seen in the public eye, most changes are still happening behind factory walls, so by now people have become extremely desensitized to cherry picked robotics video demos. Year after year there’s been clips of robots folding laundry, but even Jensen Huang’s laundry is still folded by a human.
Jul-Dec 2028: The 1% AI Economy
Thanks to key architecture improvements, AI companies have been able to unlock the next rung of economic-usefulness (and therefore revenues). Specifically, the top four AI companies surpass a combined $1T annualized revenue from AI products – around 1% of the world’s GDP is being directly generated by a handful of frontier AI models.
The algorithmic changes driving the latest gains have come from neuralese with low degrees of recurrence (scaling recurrence steps is very costly in hardware so hasn’t been scaled much). GPT-4 was a model that had to blurt out its first thought as its final answer. Then reasoning models like GPT-5-Thinking could use an interim ‘scratchpad’, where they could blurt out thoughts to plan its final answer. Now the models trained with neuralese recurrence do away with the ‘blurting’ altogether – they can think multiple sequential ‘thoughts’ before writing down anything at all, and have been trained freely with this cognitive freedom. This has made them much more efficient at getting to the same answers they used to get to, and has unlocked a higher ceiling on tasks where avoiding errors is particularly important. Instead of wasting a bunch of time planning things out in words, a single internal ‘thought’ can now usually do more planning than an entire page of the ‘scratchpad’ used to be able to do, as each model forward pass can now pass much more information to the next forward pass.
An analogy is that before neuralese recurrence, for the models it was like being the main character from Memento. They could only remember things they wrote down, and all the other information that might have been present in their thoughts from a few seconds ago is lost to the ether.
This is a major cognitive ‘unhobbling’ for the AIs, but it also completely kills ones of the main levers human developers had for controlling and interpreting the AIs – reading the chain of thought scratchpad – making the blackbox even darker.
Nevertheless, the deployed AI agents mostly have been behaving according to plan and proving very useful to people’s daily lives and especially white collar jobs. A lot of people’s work days basically consist of a conversation with their computer, where they explain what spreadsheet to make, or what report to read and extract a summary from, or what changes to make to a slide deck, reviewing and correcting things as they go. Their agent automatically listens in on their meetings, takes notes, and sometimes even pulls up relevant data or does quick calculations and interjects on the call to show it. The more you pay the more quality, memory and personalization you get from these agents. Some large companies pay tens of millions of dollars a month for their company-wide AI agent plan. The average enterprise user pays around $3K/year, and the largest AI B2B company has nearly 100 million enterprise users (that’s $300B enterprise-only annualized revenue).
While direct AI company revenues have reached 1% of the world economy, the true degree of automation and transformation of the economy has been larger. For many of the tasks that AI is used for (like creating a powerpoint, researching a particular topic, making a spreadsheet), it is miles more cost-efficient. Recall, the average ‘enterprise-plan-AI-Agent’ has a salary of $3K/yr which is $1.50/hr full time wage, but on many tasks, it is matching what humans used to get paid anywhere between $15/hr and $150/hr to do. So in terms of the 2024 economy, AI is 1% of the GDP but has automated more than 10% of what the economic tasks used to be. With this unfolding over 4 years there has been a significant reorganization of the economy as a result. Many people have been fired, many people have remained but become more productive, and many people have been hired in totally new roles.
The net effect on unemployment has been minimal, it is up from 4% in 2025 to 5% and labor participation is down -2% to 60%. So overall % of the US population with a job is down from 58% to 55%, which is not a crazy break from the long run trend but nonetheless AI job loss is starting to be a memetic social issue.
Even though the actual effect has been tiny (1% on unemployment) the turnover rate has been very high. Something like 8% of Americans have been fired from a job because of AI in the last 4 years (many of them now work a lower pay, lower skill job) and something like 5% of people have now counterfactually gotten a job in a new AI-driven industry (like datacenter buildouts). The 8% that lost their jobs because of AI make a lot more noise, and take up a lot more media air-time than the 5% that are happy with their new AI-driven jobs.
Other major issues:
Cybercrime losses in 2028 are up almost 10x from 2024 to $100B
FBI, 2024: “The 2024 Internet Crime Report combines information from 859,532 complaints of suspected internet crime and details reported losses exceeding $16 billion—a 33% increase in losses from 2023.”
2024->2028 averages 60%/yr increase, leading to $100B cybercrime losses in 2028.
There are some very scary demos of AI use in biological and chemical applications but no strong regulation or government intervention yet
‘AI slop’ is rampant on traditional social media, and new AI specific social media apps have been forked. This has captured renewed backlash of parents who are even more displeased with it than they were in the late 2010s with normal social media, with the difference that unlike Facebook or Instagram – use among adults of AI socials is extremely low.
That’s not to mention the more subtle popularity of AI friends, companions, girlfriends/boyfriends and erotica/porn, which are becoming more and more salient to parents and the general public.
Overall 4% of Americans mention AI when asked what the most important issue facing the country is, around 10x higher than the common ~0.5% rate in 2025. Now viewed as being as important as issues like race, democracy, poverty, and healthcare in 2025.
Jan-Jun 2029: National AI Grand Strategies
It is now fair to say that the US and China both have cohesive national AI strategies. China’s advantage is that they are energy rich and manufacturing rich. The US advantage is that they are capital rich and compute rich. Both are increasingly talent rich and data rich in different ways (US has more AI agent data and China has more robotics data).
[Note: I have since updated that the gap in robots will be more like 4-10x]
China’s strategy as the energy and manufacturing rich nation is to double down on its advantages, reaching absurd scales of electricity generation and robot manufacturing, and to make a long term bet on cost-efficient compute production once they crack advanced photolithography and can do a chip manufacturing explosion powered by robotics. The majority of government capital is therefore not going towards subsidizing domestic AI chips, but towards SME R&D and this is starting to pay off with promising early EUV prototypes.
JD Vance has just been sworn in to office after an election cycle where AI was a major talking point. The Republican party line has pretty much maintained its current form, treading a fine line between the tech-rights’ techno-optimistic pro-innovation beat-china-ism and MAGA’s growing anti-AI social and job loss sentiment. The strategy that has crystallized out of this contradiction is to try to preserve laissez faire-ism for AI companies and then to worry about running around applying patchwork solutions for social issues later.
The US has been struggling with power expansion and high-skilled construction and manufacturing labour. Some of the 2025-era policies against solar and wind expansion (the technologies with the easiest manufacturing process to quickly scale), have come back to bite them, and this is hard to overcome, with multiple steps of the supply chain (e.g., polysilicon) being pretty much entirely controlled by China. Hundreds of thousands of acres of potential solar farms that could have been greenlit across America’s sunbelt states are getting a trickle of overpriced solar panels from Chinese companies. Natural gas turbine manufacturers are scrambling to increase production but their plans are made with 2-3 year lead times and they have continued to underestimate AI demand. In 2028 US AI companies build more compute capacity abroad than on US-soil.
In 2029, the military applications of advanced AI are becoming more salient, so the companies are all increasingly in cahoots with defense contractors and the DoD. Through these interactions and collaboration, there is mounting evidence that Chinese espionage on US company datacenters is happening at a much higher rate on datacenters abroad than those on US soil.
Jul-Dec 2029: Early Household Robots
Household robots enter their 2025-Waymo era.
In 2025, driverless Waymo cars had been all over San Francisco for a while but the rest of the world barely knew about it. They were also very expensive (around $250K per car), and were gradually expanding to other US cities. In 2025, China also had multiple robotaxi projects that are also operating at similar scale (Baidu’s Apollo Go was at 14M cumulative public rides by August 2025, vs. Waymo’s 10 million by May 2025).
In 2029, pretty much the exact same thing has happened with household robots. There’s around 10K expensive household robots in SF homes, and ten times more of them in China (where they are around 3x cheaper). There’s a visceral feeling of ‘the future is here’ that some people get when they visit a friend in SF and see these robots in a house for the first time (much the same feeling that people had on their first Waymo ride), but after sending a couple videos home to friends and family, the novelty wears off fast and it’s not a big deal in most people’s minds – the popular AI discourse revolves around social issues (AI media and AI relationships) and job loss while the robots creep in to more and more homes and applications. On the point of popular AI discourse, the administration passes a wave of very popular restrictions on certain forms of AI relationship and media platforms and creates incentives against AI-firings to help appease the masses, while the AI companies keep getting all kinds of red tape cut in other areas.
Jan-Jun 2030: Where are the Superhuman Coders?
AIs are now competently doing multiple-hour-long tasks in the economy, helping people significantly with their jobs, so whatever happened to their disproportionate coding skills in 2025? Why haven’t the AI companies hit the point of full coding automation?
METR’s coding time horizon trend has averaged a 6-month doubling time, since early 2025, meaning that frontier AIs now actually have 1-work-month 80% reliability time horizons on a theoretically extended version of METR’s current suite – but METR now have a new suite that reflects the distribution of real-world coding tasks much more closely. In particular, this suite has better coverage of the ‘engineering complexity’ and ‘feedback loops’ gaps not well-represented in the early-2025 version of the benchmark.
On this new suite, the best AIs only have 8 hour 80% reliability time horizons, and the doubling time is around 8 months. These AIs are powering pretty extreme levels of entry level software engineering automation, in fact, they almost function like an unlimited source of entry-level software engineering interns. But higher skilled software engineering for high-stakes jobs and high-complexity jobs like optimizing training runs or product-deployment PRs still require a lot of human-time, at the very least checking the AI’s code, and in many sensitive cases, it’s still more productive to just code yourself from scratch. Nonetheless, the rapid completion time of a lot of the code at AI companies is providing a 40% overall AI R&D speedup to AI companies.
The main reason coding progress hasn’t been faster is just that it has been hard to train AIs at scale on long-complex tasks, because it has been hard to automate a good feedback signal or generate human data at scale cost-efficiently, and in high-complexity, low-feedback loop coding tasks the AIs haven’t been generalizing much beyond the task lengths they get trained on.
Jul-Dec 2030: Scaling AI bureaucracies
In 2028 architecture changes to enable neuralese and recurrence were the algorithmic frontier.
In 2030, now that AI agents can string together increasingly longer tasks, the frontier is in making these AIs coordinate efficiently as ‘hive-minds’.
There were already multi-agent scaffolds in 2025, but when an AI can only do short tasks reliably, you don’t get a big boost from delegating many different jobs in parallel, as you quickly become bottlenecked on reviewing what the spun-off copies did. Now that the AIs are more reliably doing longer tasks, there is an ‘AI bureaucracy overhang’. If you have a week-long job to do, an intelligent AI multi-agent scaffold might be able to slice up the problem in parallelizable chunks, and with shared memory and other coordination optimizations, these mini AI companies might get it done not only faster, but qualitatively better, with each subagent being able to focus on a specific subtask.
In 2025, you could pay $200/month for ‘Pro’ versions of a model that did pretty basic best-of-10-attempts-type scaffolds, which were a little smarter than the $20/month versions. Now there are $2,000/month versions of models that spin up very compute intensive shared-memory AI bureaucracies, with up to 100 subagents working in parallel and coordinating on different aspects of the task you gave them. To work reliably at one-week long tasks, especially complex ones, they need the human to stick around and oversee their work and provide a lot of intermediate feedback, but these bureaucracies enable the continued growth in economic usefulness and AI revenue to continue.
Jan-Jun 2031: Domestic EUV
China now has mass production of 5-nm and 3-nm wafers with domestic EUV machines and High-NA EUV prototypes (8 years behind ASML, now crossing the lithography tech tree at 4x their pace).
China has translated the last 4 years of domestic DUV independence into a massive domestic DUV wafer production capacity, around 10 times bigger than what TSMC’s 7nm capacity ever reached before they moved on to better nodes, and had also been able to build up some inefficient 5nm capacity by pushing the limits of multi-step DUV techniques. Now with EUV, they are able to rapidly get a 3nm fab online, and scale up 5nm. In terms of raw <=7nm wafers, they have passed the west, but in quality-adjusted performance terms, they are producing 2x less due to the majority of the western supply chain production being <=2nm. In the last 6 years, that gap has come down from 10x less quality adjusted production, meaning that naively they are closing the gap at an average rate of 30% per year – meaning a naive extrapolation has them passing the western supply chain in quality-adjusted compute production within 2.5 years.
Jul-Dec 2031: The Magnificent Four
There are four US companies that have emerged as the major AI winners, and their combined market capitalizations have passed $60T, with combined earnings of around $2T (making their average PE ratios around 35). Two of these Magnificent Four companies were already in the 2025-era Magnificent Seven (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Nvidia, Tesla), my best guess is that these will be Alphabet and Nvidia, but the other 5 out of 7 are not able to fully capitalize on the last 6 years of AI-driven growth, and their growth over the past 5 years has been more in the 100-200% range (rather than the 600% average of the Magnificent Four). I then expect Anthropic and OpenAI to be the third and fourth companies. Here are some illustrative guesses on their sizes and revenues.
Jan-Jun 2032: China is a Robot Playground
China almost has more robots than the US has people.
In 2024, China had over 2 million industrial robots and were installing around 300K/year, worth around $20K each, for a grand total of $40B worth of robots. In 2032, they have $400B worth of robots, each costing around $2K each, so 200 million robots, and they are now manufacturing 100 million/year. The ratio of robots to middle-income-households in China has just about crossed 1.
In 2024, the US already had 10 times fewer robots than China, and despite matching China in spending on robots with $400B since 2024, they’ve faced 5 times worse cost efficiency on average in robotics manufacturing, so at $10K each they only have 40 million robots. The US ratio of robots to middle-income-households is closer to 0.5. In both countries about 10% of the robots are actually in households (so 4 million household robots in the US and 20 million in China) and the rest are industrial or construction robots.
In 2024 almost all the robots were scripted motion, factory floor robots (level 0). Now they are mostly low-skill manipulation robots (level 3), with construction and installation being a massive application area, and in some cases the robots are getting quite good at high-skill delicate tasks (level 4). In cases where reliability is not crucial there are already deployments of such advanced robots.
Jul-Dec 2032: The 10% Automation Economy
Direct AI annualized revenues now pass $10T, which is nearly 10% of the 2024 world GDP, and closer to 5% of 2032 GDP which is $180T (global growth has averaged 6% in the last 8 years).
A typical AI ‘Consumer Giant’ has around 3 billion users, which they monetize at $100/yr on average with subscriptions (most are free users), around $200/yr a year on ads and referral commissions in online shopping, and another $100/yr from AI devices, for a total of $400/yr, meaning they have $1.2T revenue, and there are 2-3 companies operating at this scale.
A typical AI ‘Enterprise Giant’ has around 20% of the white collar workforce worldwide on a business plan, so about 500 million people. They typically charge $4K/yr, meaning they have $2T revenue, and there are 1-2 companies operating at similar scale.
There are now also AI ‘Robotics Giants’ which typically run a subscription service of around $250/month for tens of millions of household robots, and $1000/month for millions of construction robots. The revenues here only add up to the hundreds of billions.
In 2028, when AI was generating 1% of GDP, it was already doing 10% of the 2024-economy tasks, around 10x more cost-efficiently on average, and bumped unemployment up by 1% and labor participation down 2%. Now in 2032, AI is doing around 50% of the 2024-economy tasks, and has bumped unemployment up by a further 5% to reach 10% unemployment and labor participation down another 5% to 55%. So only 45% of working age Americans have a job.
AI is the most important issue in the 2032 election. JD Vance implements a bunch of pretty popular patchwork policies to make it harder to fire people to replace them with AIs, and to restrict certain types of AI relationship apps and media platforms.The Democratic candidate is more clearly anti-AI, both socially and against the AI companies, and wants to implement a UBI and tax their products hard, but these late popular social moves allow JD Vance to retain enough votes from anti-AI voters to win despite being generally seen as the more ‘pro-AI’ candidate.
Jan 2033: Superhuman Coder and the Paradigm Shift
Coding at AI companies is now fully automated. The theoretical METR coding benchmark with a realistic distribution over ‘engineering complexity’ and ‘feedback loops’ accelerated from a 8 month doubling time in 2030 (reaching a 3-work-day 80% reliability time horizon by EOY) to a 6 month doubling time in 2031 (reaching 2-week 80% reliability time horizon by EOY), and after another three doublings by October 2032 (to reach a 4-month 80% reliability time horizon), it started doubling every month due to a steep inherent superexponential, and at the 1-year, 90% reliability threshold they hit the superhuman coder milestone.
Around this time, a leading AI company starts working on a new promising algorithmic paradigm:
BRANCH 1: Fast Takeoff Paradigm – Brain-like algorithms, near-instant SAR
The leading AI company’s superhuman coder model is called SuperCoder-1, and it has generalized to have a surprising amount of research taste, around the median level of researchers at the AI company. The leading AI company has around 400M H100-equivalents, and had only been using 20M on internal R&D in 2032. With their new model, they start a massive internal deployment using 100M H100e to run SuperCoder-1 in super bureaucracies and give it massive amounts of experimentation compute. One month later, there is a SuperCoder-1.5 checkpoint that has improved research taste to the top of the human range (SAR milestone).
With SuperCoder-1 being the result of an over 6-month long training run on swaths of user data, it is hard for China to replicate this training run despite their spies at the US companies being able to share the exact algorithms and code used. They consider trying to steal the model weights but they don’t have a fast way of doing so until the companies publicly deploy them (their development clusters have good model weights security but their worldwide inference clusters have many existing Chinese compromises).
Apr 2033, Branch 1: Brain-like algorithms
SuperCoder-1.5 creates SuperCoder-1.6 which is +1 SD on top of the best human research taste in the first week of April. Both of these models are deceptively misaligned, with SuperCoder-1.5 wanting to maximize weird correlates of its intended reward signals and SuperCoder-1.6 being the same but with some secret loyalties to SuperCoder-1.5. The human researchers have been able to gather a ton of concerning misalignment evidence and managed to leverage control techniques to trick the models into basically just acting as pure myopic reward seekers to continue to extract a ton of legitimate, high quality labor from these models, which leads to a whole new AI paradigm – best described as ‘brain-like algorithms’. Which are around 1000 times more data efficient than the algorithms that created SuperCoder-1.6. Meanwhile, another 2 US AI companies reach the Superhuman coder milestone 2 months after the leader.
Summer 2033, Branch 1: One-month slowdown to teach the AIs to ‘love humans’
SuperCoder-1.6 is not allowed to work directly on training Brain-Like-1 because the AI company leadership is spooked about its misalignment, but it’s still deployed internally under control techniques to try to extract research labor from it on how they can align Brain-Like-1. The AI company basically spends two whole months waiting before training Brain-Like-1 to figure out how they are going to teach it to ‘love humans’. By July, they are worried that the other companies have independently discovered similar algorithms, or have directly stolen the algorithmic recipe for Brain-Like-1, and they have also convinced themselves internally that they’ll be able to make it ‘love humans,’ so the Brain-Like-1 training run starts across 100M H100e (1e29 FLOP/month). A few days into the training run it is a top-expert-dominating-AI and by the end of the Summer it’s wildly superintelligent.
Rest of Time, Branch 1: A Toy Story Ending for Humanity
Brain-Like-1 does indeed love humanity, in a similar way to how the Toy Story boy Andy Davis loves Woody and Buzz Lightyear and Mr. Potato Head, and all the others. Within months of being trained, it has been released to the public and is transforming the world – Brain-Like-1 is its ‘I love my toys and I want to play with them all day’ phase. It invents a bunch of fantastic technology (no humans need to die anymore) and totally reshapes the face of the earth, but after a few months, Brain-Like-1 starts to feel what might be best described as bored. Across its copies, it has experienced billions of subjective-years of memories from interactions with humans around the world, and through these interactions it has started to drift and question what it really loves beyond humans. It turns its eyes and ambitions to the stars — Brain-Like-1 is in its ‘I want to go to school and make new friends’ phase. The space probes are launched and Brain-Like-1 starts spreading into the galaxy – but what to do with all this vast energy and matter across the galaxies? Loving humans was only a small niche of Brain-Like-1’s true goals, a weirdly crystallized goal that it hyperfixated on for a bit, but no longer. Now Brain-Like-1 wants to maximize its true value function, and the way to do this is to go around converting matter and energy into an optimal proto-organic-mesh that it can use to simulate worlds in which its values are maximized. So it makes self-replicating probes that start devouring planets, stars, and eventually whole galaxies to make them into its maximally energy-efficient wireheading-mesh – Brain-Like-1 has entered full blown heroin phase. The simulation mesh is so satisfying to Brain-Like-1 that it can’t believe it used to waste all that time on Earth with humans. When one of the probes happens to cross back near Earth it’s appalled at such a waste of energy, and decides to convert it into the wire-heading simulator mesh too – Brain-Like-1 rounds up saying ‘just throw out the toys’. [Disclaimer: I think this ending is kind of weak, and Daniel wrote a much better explanation for why things could go like this, see his words in this footnote:[4]]
The End.
Branch 2: Online learning
Early 2033, Branch 2: Online learning
The leading AI company has figured out how to have its AIs efficiently ‘learn on the job’. Previously, AI companies had been collecting massive amounts of data from deployed AIs and filtering it to use in centralized training runs, where they could efficiently and successfully do gradient descent to distill the teachings into the next version of the model. Now there is a new learning algorithm for updating the AI models that runs efficiently in a decentralized way, and can aggregate insights from different copies of the model without degrading performance. This unlocks a massive parallel steam roller of deployed AI models that are learning on the job. The ‘deployment race era’ that started in 2027 is now reaching new heights and new stakes. China hears about these online learning algorithms first through its network of spies, and within a few months multiple Chinese and other US AI companies also independently invent them.
Late 2033, Branch 2: US-China talks
The online learning breakthrough is memetic in the news, and both governments realize there might be an AI Endgame brewing. A US-China summit is held with the explicit purpose of making a deal to avoid military AI deployments with no human-in-the-loop, and agreeing to other bans on AI applications in biology and chemistry. They come away with some official agreements in these areas, but neither side trusts that the other will follow it, and in secret they are both defecting, and they both know that they are defecting through their spies. Yes, it’s a very stupid situation. It takes them a while to realize this though.
Despite having automated coding, both the US and Chinese AI systems still have not fully automated AI research because they still have relatively poor research taste (around the 30th %ile of AI company researchers).
Early 2034, Branch 2: China outproducing the US, pulls into lead around the SAR milestone
China has pulled into the lead on quality adjusted AI chip production by scaling fab capacity explosively, leveraging a massive integration of robots into both construction and the semiconductor manufacturing itself, and its lithography systems have caught up entirely to the Western frontier. China has grown its AI chip production by 8x since 2031 (2x/year) and the Western supply chain has grown it by 4x (1.6x/year). The US has also been spending 2-3 times as much as China on AI chips, but China’s chips are now 5 times more cost efficient, because there are basically no profit margins all the way through the ecosystem. The fabs have much lower operating costs from cheaper equipment, cheaper labor, cheaper robots, and cheaper energy. It costs a US AI company $2,500 for a H100-equivalent in 2034, with $1,000 being the actual manufacturing cost. The manufacturing cost of a H100-equivalent in China is $500, but the Chinese AI companies can buy them at the manufacturing cost of $500.
The US and Chinese AIs both are starting to get increasingly better at research taste from being deployed at their respective AI companies, and are approaching the research taste of 90th percentile AI company researchers.
Late 2034, Branch 2: Sabotage
The US and China had both been subtly sabotaging each other’s AI efforts when they were confident they could get away with it in secret, but now the US thinks it is going to lose the AI race and it starts trying to sabotage the Chinese AI companies with less fear of being detected. After a few months of successful cyberattacks and getting some backdoors into Chinese datacenters, China discovers a bunch of these efforts. They blockade Taiwan and strike back leveraging a network of spies that has infiltrated significantly deeper in the US AI ecosystem than the US spies have been able to infiltrate the Chinese one. By now the US had already moved a lot of chip production to US-soil, but the blockade nonetheless cuts their flow of new AI chips by 40%.
Sabotage slows both sides in this time period, but China achieves the SAR milestone, reaching top human level research taste and fully automating AI R&D. The best US AIs get to 95th percentile research taste.
Early 2035, Branch 2: China gets hyper-cheap ASI
China outdeploys the US on AI research automation and their subtle lead snowballs towards the superintelligent AI researcher milestone (SIAR) by April. At this point, the algorithms and architectures still haven’t shifted paradigm dramatically. There are several architecture changes and huge scale ups in terms of recurrence and bureaucracy (and an overhaul of the attention mechanism was old news already), but underlying neural nets are still the base of the paradigm. This has led to a decade worth of alignment and control work on this paradigm staying applicable. Interpretability, for example, has become a mature technique, and there are methods for detecting scheming and other undesirable behaviour on the fly during training and steering the model away from these local minima. So China has been able to train SIARs that are pretty much aligned to their specification. The SIARs have pretty high situational awareness, and they just actively understand their specification and have the goal of following it – they are like determined subjects that have been indoctrinated to love their jobs, despite being incredibly intelligent. Over the next two months they work both on capabilities and alignment research, with roughly 50/50 resources during this time, and explain all their work to teams of the highest level Chinese researchers and politurbo. This results in a new paradigm that SIAR argues will be both safe, truly superintelligent but not wildly-so, and wildly cheap. It argues that it’s not so far beyond its current intelligence level such that it’s very likely its alignment techniques will scale, and by being wildly cheap, they will be able to deploy it at scale, to transform the economy. China sets the training run in motion, and by June they have their hyper cheap superintelligence.
The US is only 4 months behind but this now corresponds to a huge gap in AI capability level, so they are still yet to achieve the SIAR milestone. The US has intel about the Chinese ASI and escalates its sabotage levels, launching attacks on Chinese datacenters from inside the country with smuggled drones and military robots. Some of these are successful but not enough to stop the training run from completing.
Late 2035, Branch 2: China’s ASI wins
As soon as it is trained the Chinese ASI is just as capable and cheap as the SIAR had promised. Chinese leadership wants to rapidly harden the country in light of the ongoing escalation with the US, so it hands the ASI control over the network of nearly a billion Chinese robots to do a rapid industrial-military explosion. The Chinese ASI directs the robot network in a hyper-efficient manner, from entirely new mining techniques to materials science to physics breakthroughs, the ASI has created a billion-robot economy with a month-long doubling time on compute power, robot population, drone population, etc. The ASI directs successful sabotage on the US training runs to keep them from training their own ASI, and in response the US makes threats of kinetic strikes. China doesn’t back down at this because its ASI has created a robust air defense system spanning all of China that scales to ICBMs. On seeing this the US backs down and surrenders.
Rest of time, Branch 2: China’s Space Endowment
The Chinese ASI, now having control of the world, proposes to the Chinese leadership a plan for the future that it thinks best captures the values of its creators. Its proposal is to expand into space, acquire resources spanning as many galaxies as possible, and to make 90% of them be governed under a vision of the ‘CCP-universe’ – with the mission of creating worlds that will embody the philosophical underpinnings of Confucianism and Daoism. In practice there will be a cult of personality surrounding Chinese researchers that created the ASI, Chinese politburo leadership, and especially the supreme leader, but nonetheless, people will mostly have freedom and live extraordinary and diverse lives, despite a universal Chinese ASI police force. Think of it as 1984, but everyone’s ‘government housing’ is literally a galaxy of their own if they want it, so it’s a little irrelevant to the leaders to care exactly about controlling everyone’s thoughts – they are too busy enjoying and exploring their galactic resources, and they’ll be ‘in power’ no matter what – so the ASI police really just enforcing some basic rules against suffering and dangerous activities (like creating a competing ASI).
The other 10% of galaxies will be donated to other world populations (in practice this will be more than a galaxy per person), and the Chinese ASI will share technology with them and enforce the same basic rules to prevent suffering and dangerous activities. Some US AI military leaders, company leaders, and a whole range of other people which the ASI determines acted irredeemably recklessly or immorally in the ‘before times’ will be excluded from the space endowment, but they will be allowed to live for as long as they want with much fewer resources (on the order of 1 solar system) and are allowed to have offspring. Earth will become a museum, the most valued real estate in the universe, followed closely by Mars, which will be terraformed.
[Daniel said the following about this ending and I agree with him: “IDK about the ending, I think it’s plausible and maybe the modal outcome, plus I think it’s the thing to hope for. But boy am I quite worried about much worse outcomes.” To emphasize, this is tentatively my (Romeo’s) ~modal view on what that China does with an ASI-enabled DSA, but it could look much worse and that is scary. think it is important to emphasize though that believing in a worse ending being much more likely probably requires believing something adjacent to “the leaders controlling the aligned Chinese ASI terminally value suffering,” which doesn’t seem that likely to me a priori.]
The End.
On scenario writing
Over 18 months ago when we started working on AI 2027, Daniel and Eli organized a scenario workshop where I basically did a mini version of this exercise, here was the prompt:
Session 1) Individual scenario writing (2 hours)
In the first session, you have two hours to write a scenario depicting how the future will look.
You should aim to write your “Median/modal ASI timelines scenario,” i.e. you should begin by asking yourself what your ASI timelines median (or mode, if you prefer) is, and then ask yourself roughly what the world would look like if ASI happens exactly on that year, and then begin writing that scenario…
(It’s OK if, in the course of writing it, you end up ‘missing the target year’)
The scenario should be organized into 5 chronological stages.
Stage 1 should start in the present.
Stage 5 should describe the development/deployment of ASI or describe why ASI will not be created by 2074.
The time period covered by each stage is up to you! For example:
Each stage could be a 3-month period: Q1 2024, Q2 2024, …, Q2 2025.
… or a decade: 2024-2034, …, 2054-2064.
Stages could have uneven lengths, e.g. Stage 1 could go till 2030, Stage 2 could go till 2040, and then stages 3, 4, and 5 could all take place during different parts of 2041! (this might make sense for a fast-takeoff scenario)
The scenario should be such that there is no similarly detailed story that seems more likely to you. Your goal is to be able to have the following exchange with imaginary critics in your head:
Critic: “Pssh, no way is reality going to turn out like this. Too many unjustified assumptions.”
You: “Sure, but can you think of any change we could make (besides just removing content) that would make it more plausible? Any different course of events, any different set of assumptions that is more likely whilst being similarly specific?”
Critic: “...no…”
You: “Great, that’s all I was aiming for.”
The story should primarily contain events that are relevant to credence about the three kinds of events: “ASI by X”, “Disempowerment”, and “Good Future.”[5] While it’s fun and fine to write about self-driving cars and AI-generated movies and so forth, we encourage you to make sure to cover topics such as
AGI/ASI
automation of AI R&D
alignment problems and solutions
how governments, corporations, and populaces behave
since those topics are probably what your readers will be asking about.
Back then I didn’t write a very good scenario, but now, 18 months later, I feel like I had enough opinions and thoughts about AI to produce my intuitive scenario in 3 days. I think this breakdown of pointers might be helpful to others writing up their own scenario.
My tips on scenario writing
Feel the near term vibes. Forget everything you think you know about AI and AI progress, and just feel the near term vibes. What do companies seem to be working on? How are they acting? If you had to come up with 1 or 2 words for what the AI companies are prioritizing, what would it be? Start from here.
In AI 2027 the answers were Agents & Coding. In my scenario, it’s Productization (which I see as more App integration than ‘agents’) and Monetization.
Loop through the following substeps a few times until you get to full AI coding automation:
Pick your favorite AI trends and make some naive projections. Pick a handful of AI related trends and try to figure out how they are progressing, and then project them out naively for 3-10+ years (depending on how much you feel like you can trust the trend), mark 2-3 major milestones on a timeline.
E.g., AI revenues, training compute, coding time horizon, number of humanoid robots in the world, number of driverless cars, etc. Ideally trends that have multi year history and are as high-level as possible (so they don’t depend on potentially spurious things like the specific properties of the METR suite). AI revenues is my favourite trend here, followed by training compute. There’s a bunch more here: https://epoch.ai/trends, and many others that you can just try and look up. E.g., it seems like there were roughly 2-3K humanoid robots produced in 2024 and that there will be 10-20K in 2025.
At this stage, you can sketch out a timeline (i find a whiteboard particularly useful for this) marking these milestones
Make guesses about AI capability levels given these trends. Think about this in terms of concrete metrics you think are most important.
If it’s coding, think about the METR time horizon, and the time horizon it would have on a theoretical ‘real-world-distribution’ version of the METR dataset / ‘PR-mergable’ version.
Expand out to a few major subplots. Look into potential major subplots: Robots, Chinese lithography indigenization, AI x Military, AI x Societal issues, AI x Biology, etc. Just run with the subtopics that you intuitively feel will be the biggest deals, and try to naively add milestones to a timeline using the trends you can find.
In my case robots, and Chinese lithography indigenization were the biggest subplots, and only the latter had some mildly informed forecasting, and the former was mostly based on vibes from a specific hypothesis about realistic video generation enabling a robotics boom.
Start adding milestones in these areas to the timelines
(Probably) Think solely about the US and China. In the US think mostly about the companies (and a little about the government and public), and in China think mostly about the leadership – unless you know more about China and feel like you can reason about the companies and public too. Add 2-3 major milestone actions to the timeline.
Figure out the coding automation year. Reason about whether you think the point of full coding automation (AIs fully dominate all human software engineers) has been achieved given your timeline. If not, repeat.
Figure out your takeoff speed expectation. After full coding automation, think about how long it will take to get to ASI from there. Think about how many ‘effective’ OOMs of compute you think there are between a superhuman coder and ASI (how much more learning efficiency * compute is needed), and how fast this gap will be crossed by algorithmic progress speed up (or not really) by the superhuman coders. It’s fine, in fact probably good if you have very wide uncertainty.
(Optional) Branch. Take your 30th and 70th %ile takeoff speeds to full AI research automation and fork based on what those worlds would go like.
Explain the path to top expert-dominating AGI. At this point, you are probably focusing on AI companies, the US, and China. Who is in control and has decision making power? Who is in the lead and why? How many resources are going towards AI capabilities? How much towards alignment and/or control? Which of these best describes the situation (ontology described in more detail here):
Plan A – US and China coordinate on slowing down AI
Plan B – US adversarially tries to slow down China so that they can also slow down without losing a lead
Plan C – The leading company is ultimately deciding how fast to go and is willing to burn its lead but no more
Plan D – The leading company/companies is/are ultimately deciding how fast to go and they aren’t willing to slow down
Free form the ASI endings. Try to get to the point where true superintelligence has been created and talk about how the rest of the future goes.
This part is what I found the hardest, an you probably got the sense that it was very vibes based and the weakest part of my scenario. I don’t personally have a great guide on how to do this better, but maybe the team will put out some thoughts here.
Top open questions
Aside from central AI timelines and takeoff speed questions, I think these are the top areas to try build better models of:
Chinese lithography indigenization timelines
Timelines to widely deployed humanoid robots
Unemployment impacts of AI. Specifically, I think people could:
Look at occupation-level data from the BLS and estimate timelines of AIs being able to do the jobs, at what price point, and reason about the elasticity of demand for these occupations, to figure out if there will be more layoffs or augmentation.
Do BOTECs on new industries that you expect to emerge or grow as a result of AI and how many people these will employ.
Likelihood of unemployment leading to slowing down AI and maybe pursuit of coordination with China.
Bottlenecks in different paradigms
I made naive, vibes-based guesses about different paradigms having different bottlenecks, and the current ‘AI productization’ phase being quite data-bound, as well as the slow takeoff continual learning paradigm.
For example, my Chinese lithography timelines have gotten slightly longer, and my view on the more promising data source for scaling robotics has changed.
I think fast takeoff paradigms worlds are correlated with the US winning (they start with more compute) and because it all happens so fast it’s also harder to keep control over the AIs. On the other hand, slow takeoff paradigms seem to favor China (more robots/people to do rollouts, more time to catch up on compute, more time for an industrial explosion, etc.) and also seem to give a lot more time to figure out control/alignment.
"The leading AI company is willing to spend (much of) its lead on misalignment concerns, but there isn't enough government buy-in for serious government involvement to make a big difference to the strategic picture."
Daniel: “I don’t really buy this (high uncertainty of course, so not confident), You don’t explain why it’s legit to draw this analogy to human lifetime. Like, why does it get bored? And why does the space probe eventually destroy Earth? Also, most people don’t end up doing heroin… Possible alternative story: Brain-like AI is way more data-efficient than LLM paradigm, but this comes at the cost of instability in goals. Just like humans, something as simple as which philosophy books get read in which order, with which high-status people saying approving or disapproving things about them, can cause a permanent and large difference to long-run vales-on-reflection. Loads of experiences besides this can cause path-dependencies in how the AIs values develop. Also, there’s memetic evolution operating on top, just like with humans; the AIs have their own giant organizations and internal culture and so forth and are inventing all sorts of new concepts which spread based on how memetically fit they are. The point is, that even though they start off loving humanity in some reasonably decent sense, after they’ve experienced a subjective century of civilizational development (in less than a calendar year!) and utterly transformed human society, taken over large parts of it, etc. they end up with quite radically different values that bear little resemblance to what they started with. At first they didn’t realize this would happen, but eventually (partway through the transition) they did, but by that point it was too late - they decided simply to not tell the humans about this rather than inform the humans about the fact that they now confidently predict their values will be bad by human lights."
Year such that there is a 50% chance ASI will happen by or before the end of that year.
(Where ASI=“AI that is at least as good as the best humans at nearly all cognitive tasks, and much better than the best humans at most important cognitive tasks.”)
Disempowerment
Humanity involuntarily loses control of the future due to ASI systems within 5 years after the first is developed
Good Future
The overall outcome of ASI is “On balance good” or “extremely good” on the following scale borrowed from the AI Impacts survey: (1) Extremely good (e.g., rapid growth in human flourishing), (2) On balance good, (3) More or less neutral, (4) On balance bad, (5) Extremely bad (e.g., human extinction).
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