Clarifying How Our AI Timelines Forecasts Have Changed Since AI 2027

Clarifying how our AI timelines forecasts have changed since AI 2027 AI Futures Project Subscribe Sign in Clarifying how our AI timelines forecasts have changed since AI 2027 Correcting common misunderstandings Eli Lifland , Daniel Kokotajlo , and Brendan Halstead Jan 27, 2026 55 10 7 Share Some recent news articles discuss updates to our AI timelines since AI 2027, most notably our new timelines and takeoff model, the AI Futures Model (see blog post announcement ). 1 While we’re glad to see broader discussion of the AI timelines, these articles make substantial errors in their reporting. Please don’t assume that their contents accurately represent things we’ve written or believe! This post aims to clarify our past and current views. 2 The articles in question include: The Guardian: Leading AI expert delays timeline for its possible destruction of humanity The Independent: AI ‘could be last technology humanity ever builds’, expert warns in ‘doom timeline’ Inc: AI Expert Predicted AI Would End Humanity in 2027—Now He’s Changing His Timeline WaPo: The world has a few more years Daily Mirror: AI expert reveals exactly how long is left until terrifying end of humanity Our views at a high level Important things that we believed in Apr 2025 when we published AI 2027, and still believe now: AGI and superintelligence (ASI) will eventually be built and might be built soon, and thus we should be prepared for them to be built soon. We are highly uncertain about when AGI and ASI will be built, we certainly cannot confidently predict a specific year. How exactly have we changed our minds over the past 9 months? Here are the highlights. Here is Daniel’s current all-things-considered distribution for TED-AI ( source ): If you’d like to see a more complete table including more metrics as well as our model’s raw outputs, see below . We’ve also made this graph of Daniel and Eli’s AGI medians over time, which goes further into the past: See below for the data behind this graph. Correcting common misunderstandings Categorizing the misunderstandings/misrepresentations in articles covering our work: Implying that we were confident an AI milestone (e.g. SC, AGI, or ASI) would happen in 2027 (Guardian, Inc, Daily Mirror) . We’ve done our best to make it clear that it has never been the case that we were confident AGI would arrive in 2027. For example, we emphasized our uncertainty several times in AI 2027 and, to make it even more clear, we’ve recently added a paragraph explaining this to the AI 2027 foreword. Comparing our old modal prediction to our new model’s prediction with median parameters (Guardian, Independent, WaPo, Daily Mirror), and comparing our old modal prediction to Daniel’s new median SC/AGI predictions as stated in his tweet (WaPo). This is wrong, but tricky since we didn’t report our new mode or old medians very prominently. With this blog post, we’re hoping to make this more clear. Implying that the default displayed prediction on aifuturesmodel.com 

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