This is a hasty speculative fiction vignette of one way I expect we might get AGI by January 2025 (within about one year of writing this). Like similar works by others, I expect most of the guesses herein to turn out incorrect. However, this was still useful for expanding my imagination about what could happen to enable very short timelines, and I hope it’s also useful to you. The assistant opened the door, and I walked into Director Yarden’s austere office. For the Director of a major new federal institute, her working space was surprisingly devoid of possessions. But I suppose the DHS’s Superintelligence Defense Institute was only created last week. “You’re Doctor Browning?” Yarden asked from her desk. “Yes, Director,” I replied. “Take a seat,” she said, gesturing. I complied as the lights flickered ominously. “Happy New Year, thanks for coming,” she said. “I called you in today to brief me on how the hell we got here, and to help me figure out what we should do next.” “Happy New Year. Have you read my team’s Report?” I questioned. “Yes,” she said, “and I found all 118 pages absolutely riveting. But I want to hear it from you straight, all together.” “Well, okay,” I said. The Report was all I’d been thinking about lately, but it was quite a lot to go over all at once. “Where should I start?” “Start at the beginning, last year in June, when this all started to get weird.” “All right, Director,” I began, recalling the events of the past year. “June 2024 was when it really started to sink in, but the actual changes began a year ago in January. And the groundwork for all that had been paved for a few years before then. You see, with generative AI systems, which are a type of AI that—” “Spare the lay explanations, doctor,” Yarden interrupted. “I have a PhD in machine learning from MIT.” “Right. Anyway, it turned out that transformers were even more compute-efficient architectures than we originally thought they were.