2: AI may attain human level soon

The main companies building AI, such as OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind, are explicitly aiming for artificial general intelligence: AI that has the same kind of general reasoning ability that humans have, and can do all the same tasks and jobs (at least the ones that don’t require a physical body).

We’re not quite there yet, and predicting technological progress is hard. But there are a few reasons to think we'll see human-level AI soon — in decades or maybe even just a few years.

• Extrapolating intuitively from past progress, if AI took just a few years to go from a high-school-level to a PhD-level ability to answer questions in science, mathematics, and programming,^{1 2 3} then it’s not crazy to think it could overcome the remaining hurdles to general human-level reasoning in a few more years.
• Looking at the gap that remains between current and human-level AI, there isn't widespread agreement on a clear and qualitative factor that is missing. Progress doesn’t seem to be stalling out, and we might reach human level just by training larger models (the “scaling hypothesis”)⁴. Even if scaling isn’t enough and we need new ideas, we may not need many new ideas to build something human-level.
• Some people have tried to build quantitative models of future AI progress. One way of doing this is to estimate the level of computing power it would take to train a human-level model. (For example, one can roughly calculate human biological equivalents: How much computing power does the brain use in a lifetime? Over evolutionary history?) We have major uncertainty about what that level of compute is, but it’s unlikely to be more than ten orders of magnitude away — perhaps much fewer. We’re on track to continue making major leaps toward it. Large companies are investing hundreds of billions per year into datacenter infrastructure intended largely for future AI. As of early 2025, the “Stargate” collaboration plans to build AI technology with half a trillion dollars. And both hardware and software keep getting not just larger in scale, but better. It’s hard to get precise estimates from modeling AI progress, but overall, it tends to predict AGI in the coming decades.
• Finally, the people who know most about the technology predict AGI soon. Some founders of AI labs, such as Anthropic’s Dario Amodei⁵ and Google DeepMind’s Shane Legg, are saying we’ll get there in a few years. They might be motivated to hype the technology for financial gain, but academic AI experts with no financial stake in AI are making similar predictions: Geoffrey Hinton and Yoshua Bengio have both predicted it will happen in 5 to 20 years. Another “godfather of AI,” Yann LeCun, has been skeptical of fast progress based on current approaches. But his skepticism now takes the form of: “When I say very far, it’s not centuries, it may not be decades, but it’s several years.”⁶

Given that intuition, modeling, and experts suggest that we could reach human-level AI soon, it’s reasonable to plan for that possibility. But human-level isn’t the limit — systems can potentially become far smarter than us.