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My main issue with this timeline is that AI still has trouble transitioning to the real world. It predicts for 2029: > There are swarms of insect-sized drones

My main issue with this timeline is that AI still has trouble transitioning to the real world. It predicts for 2029: > There are swarms of insect-sized drones that can poison human infantry before they are even noticed; flocks of bird-sized drones to hunt the insects; new ICBM interceptors, and new, harder-to-intercept ICBMs. The rest of the world watches the buildup in horror, but it seems to have a momentum of its own. Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now, to the degree that we need bird drones to hunt the insect drones? How the hell are these things powered? Lean/math/millenienium prizes are "grindable" [0]. Wake me up when AI is making order-of-magnitude improvements in ungrindable real world tasks like batteries, hypersonic engine manufacturing, and stealth/silent motors that you can't hear. [0]: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/the-next-paradigm

nancyminusone 8d ago
I have much more faith that AI would come up with a way to bioengineer ordinary mosquitoes than have any chance at a tiny insect sized robot
- AlexErrant 8d ago
  Agree. Gonna note that biology is even less grindable than ordinary chemistry/physics/engineering. We'll have advancements in other real-world fields before AI-powered bioengineering becomes A Thing.
pizza234 8d ago
> Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now The industrial expansion timelinen as described in AI 2027 is way too compressed; I don't think any AI doomer believes that. The dynamics are plausible though, even without China stealing the weights.
- AlexErrant 8d ago
  Literally 2 days ago, from a former Anthropic researcher: > The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394 https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394 > The dynamics are plausible Please elaborate: what dynamics? This is rather vague. My point is that AI can't grind real world physics/chemistry/engineering. What dynamics are in play here?
  - mf2hd 8d ago
    Solve the grinding then: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-026-01964-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-026-01964-8
    - AlexErrant 8d ago
      This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication. I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.
  - naveen99 8d ago
    I think if organized crime couldn’t conquer the world, ai doesn’t have a chance. I mean it would be defeating by the enemy yelling “mitochondria !!!!”
- doom2 8d ago
  What theft? Modern humans learned from the works of past humans, LLMs learned from the works of modern humans, other LLMs learned from those LLMs. Given that the methods by which Anthropic and OpenAI obtained training data remains a legal gray area, it's not so cut and dry to me that distillation is stealing. It's just a continuation of the long tradition of building knowledge on the knowledge of others.
  - applicative 8d ago
    It stuns the mind that anyone can compose such a sophism.
  - pizza234 8d ago
    I take it you didn't read AI 2027; it doesn't philosophize about cultural property - it simply narrates that a turning point is China acquiring the Agent's weights through hacking. "Stealing" in this context is simply the strictly legal term.
AlexCoventry 8d ago
I think the idea is that AI itself is going to massively accelerate its own development, and AI with real-world competence is coming very soon. At the rate things are going, it wouldn't suprise me at all if we had mass production of AI-designed systems in the next six months, actually.
- AlexErrant 8d ago
  Sup fellow Alex. > AI with real-world competence is coming very soon Disagree, Moravec's Paradox remains undefeated. How long has Elon promised self-driving cars? Or how long have we been seeing humanoid-robot-walking demos? Laundry folding demos? Let's assume that a magical AI powered robot hand lands tomorrow. How long do you think it'll take to ramp up assembly/production/distribution/sourcing/materials/QA for, say, a million of them? Never mind the legal/integration/maintenance time. And even once those have landed, and assuming they are ALL put to work on iterating on research testing to build out super-high-capacity-drone-batteries, how long do you think it would take for that to evolve into killer-insect-drones? BTW you should know that even though high capacity silicon carbon batteries exist, they haven't supplanted other Li-ion batteries for a host of reasons. A million things stand between a technology working in a lab and surviving the real world. And during this entire process, the (geo)political/social/legal process will be churning away, changing the societal landscape in which the killer-robots land. Not to mention that mechanistic interpretability is (likely) somewhat grindable. A lab just needs to dump a billion dollars of compute into it after it declares AGI. I'm unconvinced we get killer insect drones before we crack mech-interp. And even once we get killer insect drones, they need to somehow have no kill-switch and then literally exterminate everyone on the globe? Can you see why I have a problem with doomers predicting human extinction within the decade? I'm putting words in your mouth and not replying to precisely what you said, just the general vibe. LMK if I overstepped. P.S. we do have mass production of AI designed systems today e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna There's nuance to this whole thing.
mf2hd 8d ago
Room temperature superconductivity, developed by AI Poulsen treatment for the rich (https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Poulsen_treatments https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Poulsen_treatments) The race is for things that does not exist today.

nancyminusone 8d ago

I have much more faith that AI would come up with a way to bioengineer ordinary mosquitoes than have any chance at a tiny insect sized robot

AlexErrant 8d ago
Agree. Gonna note that biology is even less grindable than ordinary chemistry/physics/engineering. We'll have advancements in other real-world fields before AI-powered bioengineering becomes A Thing.

pizza234 8d ago

> Does anyone really predict insect drones _in production_ 3 years from now The industrial expansion timelinen as described in AI 2027 is way too compressed; I don't think any AI doomer believes that. The dynamics are plausible though, even without China stealing the weights.

AlexErrant 8d ago
Literally 2 days ago, from a former Anthropic researcher: > The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394 https://x.com/hilbertspaess/status/2097476203863224394 > The dynamics are plausible Please elaborate: what dynamics? This is rather vague. My point is that AI can't grind real world physics/chemistry/engineering. What dynamics are in play here?
- mf2hd 8d ago
  Solve the grinding then: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-026-01964-8 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41524-026-01964-8
  - AlexErrant 8d ago
    This doesn't solve grinding? If it did, we'd see results by now (Published: 27 January 2026), and there's months of delay between submission and publication. I'm willing to be wrong, but I'm just not seeing anything worth doomering over. There are multiple companies throwing AI at materials discovery; a research paper about a "data-driven framework" is about as unthreatening to my thesis as it gets. I'm willing to cede the point if say, Radical releases ~3 new materials that have commercial applicability and ~3x some useful metric e.g. tensile strength, but until then, to my amateur eye, it looks like AI+Real World is missing its ChatGPT moment.
- naveen99 8d ago
  I think if organized crime couldn’t conquer the world, ai doesn’t have a chance. I mean it would be defeating by the enemy yelling “mitochondria !!!!”
doom2 8d ago
What theft? Modern humans learned from the works of past humans, LLMs learned from the works of modern humans, other LLMs learned from those LLMs. Given that the methods by which Anthropic and OpenAI obtained training data remains a legal gray area, it's not so cut and dry to me that distillation is stealing. It's just a continuation of the long tradition of building knowledge on the knowledge of others.
- applicative 8d ago
  It stuns the mind that anyone can compose such a sophism.
- pizza234 8d ago
  I take it you didn't read AI 2027; it doesn't philosophize about cultural property - it simply narrates that a turning point is China acquiring the Agent's weights through hacking. "Stealing" in this context is simply the strictly legal term.

AlexCoventry 8d ago

I think the idea is that AI itself is going to massively accelerate its own development, and AI with real-world competence is coming very soon. At the rate things are going, it wouldn't suprise me at all if we had mass production of AI-designed systems in the next six months, actually.

AlexErrant 8d ago
Sup fellow Alex. > AI with real-world competence is coming very soon Disagree, Moravec's Paradox remains undefeated. How long has Elon promised self-driving cars? Or how long have we been seeing humanoid-robot-walking demos? Laundry folding demos? Let's assume that a magical AI powered robot hand lands tomorrow. How long do you think it'll take to ramp up assembly/production/distribution/sourcing/materials/QA for, say, a million of them? Never mind the legal/integration/maintenance time. And even once those have landed, and assuming they are ALL put to work on iterating on research testing to build out super-high-capacity-drone-batteries, how long do you think it would take for that to evolve into killer-insect-drones? BTW you should know that even though high capacity silicon carbon batteries exist, they haven't supplanted other Li-ion batteries for a host of reasons. A million things stand between a technology working in a lab and surviving the real world. And during this entire process, the (geo)political/social/legal process will be churning away, changing the societal landscape in which the killer-robots land. Not to mention that mechanistic interpretability is (likely) somewhat grindable. A lab just needs to dump a billion dollars of compute into it after it declares AGI. I'm unconvinced we get killer insect drones before we crack mech-interp. And even once we get killer insect drones, they need to somehow have no kill-switch and then literally exterminate everyone on the globe? Can you see why I have a problem with doomers predicting human extinction within the decade? I'm putting words in your mouth and not replying to precisely what you said, just the general vibe. LMK if I overstepped. P.S. we do have mass production of AI designed systems today e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evolved_antenna There's nuance to this whole thing.

mf2hd 8d ago

Room temperature superconductivity, developed by AI Poulsen treatment for the rich (https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Poulsen_treatments https://hyperioncantos.fandom.com/wiki/Poulsen_treatments) The race is for things that does not exist today.