What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2025?

In early 2025, after OpenAI put out the first-ever reasoning models — o1 and o3 — short timelines to transformative artificial general intelligence swept the AI world. But then, in the second half of 2025, sentiment swung all the way back in the other direction, with people's forecasts for when AI might really shake up the world blowing out even further than they had been before reasoning models came along.

What the hell happened? Was it just swings in vibes and mood? Confusion? A series of fundamentally unexpected and unpredictable research results?

Host Rob Wiblin has been trying to make sense of it for himself, and here's the best explanation he's come up with so far.

Links to learn more, video, and full transcript: https://80k.info/tl

Chapters:

  • Making sense of the timelines madness in 2025 (00:00:00)
  • The great timelines contraction (00:00:46)
  • Why timelines went back out again (00:02:10)
  • Other longstanding reasons AGI could take a good while (00:11:13)
  • So what's the upshot of all of these updates? (00:14:47)
  • 5 reasons the radical pessimists are still wrong (00:16:54)
  • Even long timelines are short now (00:23:54)

This episode was recorded on January 29, 2026.

Video and audio editing: Dominic Armstrong, Milo McGuire, Luke Monsour, and Simon Monsour
Music: CORBIT
Camera operator: Dominic Armstrong
Coordination, transcripts, and web: Katy Moore

Episoder(333)

#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

#81 Classic episode - Ben Garfinkel on scrutinising classic AI risk arguments

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. 80,000 Hours, along with many other members of the effective altruism movement, has argued that helping to positively shape the develo...

9 Jan 20232h 37min

#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons

#83 Classic episode - Jennifer Doleac on preventing crime without police and prisons

Rebroadcast: this episode was originally released in July 2020. Today’s guest, Jennifer Doleac — Associate Professor of Economics at Texas A&M University, and Director of the Justice Tech Lab — is a...

4 Jan 20232h 17min

#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

#143 – Jeffrey Lewis on the most common misconceptions about nuclear weapons

America aims to avoid nuclear war by relying on the principle of 'mutually assured destruction,' right? Wrong. Or at least... not officially.As today's guest — Jeffrey Lewis, founder of Arms Control W...

29 Des 20222h 40min

#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction

#142 – John McWhorter on key lessons from linguistics, the virtue of creoles, and language extinction

John McWhorter is a linguistics professor at Columbia University specialising in research on creole languages.He's also a content-producing machine, never afraid to give his frank opinion on anything ...

20 Des 20221h 47min

#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well

#141 – Richard Ngo on large language models, OpenAI, and striving to make the future go well

Large language models like GPT-3, and now ChatGPT, are neural networks trained on a large fraction of all text available on the internet to do one thing: predict the next word in a passage. This simpl...

13 Des 20222h 44min

My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)

My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it (Article)

Today’s release is a reading of our article called My experience with imposter syndrome — and how to (partly) overcome it, written and narrated by Luisa Rodriguez. If you want to check out the links...

8 Des 202244min

Rob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy

Rob's thoughts on the FTX bankruptcy

In this episode, usual host of the show Rob Wiblin gives his thoughts on the recent collapse of FTX. Click here for an official 80,000 Hours statement. And here are links to some potentially relev...

23 Nov 20225min

#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline

#140 – Bear Braumoeller on the case that war isn't in decline

Is war in long-term decline? Steven Pinker's The Better Angels of Our Nature brought this previously obscure academic question to the centre of public debate, and pointed to rates of death in war to a...

8 Nov 20222h 47min

Populært innen Fakta

fastlegen
dine-penger-pengeradet
relasjonspodden-med-dora-thorhallsdottir-kjersti-idem
foreldreradet
treningspodden
rss-strid-de-norske-borgerkrigene
mikkels-paskenotter
rss-bisarr-historie
jakt-og-fiskepodden
rss-sunn-okonomi
sinnsyn
rss-kunsten-a-leve
hverdagspsyken
tomprat-med-gunnar-tjomlid
rss-bak-luftfarten
fryktlos
ukast
rss-mind-body-podden
level-up-med-anniken-binz
rss-kull