“A deep critique of AI 2027’s bad timeline models” by titotal

Thank you to Arepo and Eli Lifland for looking over this article for errors.

I am sorry that this article is so long. Every time I thought I was done with it I ran into more issues with the model, and I wanted to be as thorough as I could. I’m not going to blame anyone for skimming parts of this article.

Note that the majority of this article was written before Eli's updated model was released (the site was updated june 8th). His new model improves on some of my objections, but the majority still stand.

Introduction:

AI 2027 is an article written by the “AI futures team”. The primary piece is a short story penned by Scott Alexander, depicting a month by month scenario of a near-future where AI becomes superintelligent in 2027,proceeding to automate the entire economy in only a year or two [...]

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Outline:

(00:43) Introduction:

(05:19) Part 1: Time horizons extension model

(05:25) Overview of their forecast

(10:28) The exponential curve

(13:16) The superexponential curve

(19:25) Conceptual reasons:

(27:48) Intermediate speedups

(34:25) Have AI 2027 been sending out a false graph?

(39:45) Some skepticism about projection

(43:23) Part 2: Benchmarks and gaps and beyond

(43:29) The benchmark part of benchmark and gaps:

(50:01) The time horizon part of the model

(54:55) The gap model

(57:28) What about Eli's recent update?

(01:01:37) Six stories that fit the data

(01:06:56) Conclusion

The original text contained 11 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 19th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/PAYfmG2aRbdb74mEp/a-deep-critique-of-ai-2027-s-bad-timeline-models

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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