“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 SleepI 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 [...] ---Outline:(00:35) The Current Paradigm: Im Tucking In to Sleep(10:24) Real-World Predictions(15:25) Closing ThoughtsThe original text contained 7 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: March 5th, 2025 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/oKAFFvaouKKEhbBPm/a-bear-case-my-predictions-regarding-ai-progress --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.