AI progress and recommendations

When the popular conception of the Turing test went whooshing by, many of us thought it was a little strange how much daily life just kept going. This was a milestone people had talked about for decades. It felt impossibly out of reach, then all of a sudden it felt close, then all of a sudden we were on the other side. We got some great new products and not much about the world changed, even though computers can now converse and think about hard problems.

Most of the world still thinks about AI as chatbots and better search, but today, we have systems that can outperform the smartest humans at some of our most challenging intellectual competitions. Although AI systems are still spikey and face serious weaknesses, systems that can solve such hard problems seem more like 80% of the way to an AI researcher than 20% of the way. The gap between how most people are using AI and what AI is presently capable of is immense.

AI systems that can discover new knowledge—either autonomously, or by making people more effective—are likely to have a significant impact on the world.

In just a few years, AI has gone from only being able to do tasks (in the realm of software engineering specifically) that a person can do in a few seconds to tasks that take a person more than an hour. We expect to have systems that can do tasks that take a person days or weeks soon; we do not know how to think about systems that can do tasks that would take a person centuries.

At the same time, the cost per unit of a given level of intelligence has fallen steeply; 40x per year is a reasonable estimate over the last few years! 

In 2026, we expect AI to be capable of making very small discoveries. In 2028 and beyond, we are pretty confident we will have systems that can make more significant discoveries (though we could of course be wrong, this is what our research progress appears to indicate).

Here are several things we think could help with achieving a positive future with AI: