“A Bear Case: My Predictions Regarding AI Progress” by Thane Ruthenis

This isn't really a "timeline", as such – I don't know the timings – but this is my current, fairly optimistic take on where we're heading.

I'm not fully committed to this model yet: I'm still on the lookout for more agents and inference-time scaling later this year. But Deep Research, Claude 3.7, Claude Code, Grok 3, and GPT-4.5 have turned out largely in line with these expectations[1], and this is my current baseline prediction.

The Current Paradigm: I'm Tucking In to Sleep

I expect that none of the currently known avenues of capability advancement are sufficient to get us to AGI[2].

• I don't want to say the pretraining will "plateau", as such, I do expect continued progress. But the dimensions along which the progress happens are going to decouple from the intuitive "getting generally smarter" metric, and will face steep diminishing returns.
  • Grok 3 and GPT-4.5 [...]

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Outline:

(00:35) The Current Paradigm: Im Tucking In to Sleep

(10:24) Real-World Predictions

(15:25) Closing Thoughts

The original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
March 5th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKAFFvaouKKEhbBPm/a-bear-case-my-predictions-regarding-ai-progress

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.