Ajeya Cotra

But as Yudkowsky pointed out, there's uncertainty on both sides.

Sometimes the fact that a forecast is imperfect and you can never be certain means things are more dangerous than you thought.

I think internalizing this lesson is more important than any sort of micro-calibrating exactly how much to believe in probabilistic forecasts.

Once you understand that you can't always just rely on your biases and sense that it would be inconvenient for things to get weird, you become desperate for real information.

That desperation encourages you to seek any possible source of knowledge, including potentially fallible and error-laden probabilistic forecasts.

It also encourages you to treat them lightly, as small updates useful for resolving near-total uncertainty into merely partial uncertainty.

This is how I treat BioAnchors' successors, although right now a little more fallibility and error-ladenness might be genuinely welcome.

Here's an image showing some text.

It's captioned AI 2027's forecast for early 2026.

It says early 2026, coding automation.

The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off.

OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent 1 internally for AI R&D.

Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistance, and more importantly, faster than their competitors.

Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed Agent 0, including an open weights model.

OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent 1, which is more capable and reliable.

People naturally try to compare Agent 1 to humans, but it has a very different skill profile.

It knows more facts than any human, knows practically every programming language, and can solve well-specified coding problems extremely quickly.

On the other hand, Agent 1 is bad at even simple long-horizon tasks, like beating video games it hasn't played before.

Still, the common workday is eight hours, and a day's work can usually be separated into smaller chunks.

You could think of Agent 1 as a scatterbrained employee who thrives under careful management.