Toby Ord

Broad Timelines by Toby Ord Published on March 19, 2026 No one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world.

People aren't sure and shouldn't be sure.

There just isn't enough evidence to pin it down.

But we don't need to wait for certainty.

I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously, if we act with epistemic humility.

What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines?

I'll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well.

And it has even more implications for how we act together, for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.

There's an image here.

Description.

Subheading.

AI Timelines.

By AI Timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world.

People often think about this using terms such as Artificial General Intelligence, AGI, Human Level AI, Transformative AI, or Superintelligence.

Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines.

Indeed, even an individual's own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have trouble specifying in which year it happened.

Many commentators have suggested this makes terms such as AGI useless, but I don't think that is right.

I like to think of it in terms of a group of hikers seeing a mountain in the distance, towering up into the clouds and beyond, with its snowy peak catching the sun's light.

They talk animatedly about how amazing it would be to climb so high that they are inside a cloud.

Or imagine being above the clouds, looking over them like an angel.