[Linkpost] “Q1 2026 Timelines Update” by Daniel Kokotajlo, elifland, bhalstead

This is a link post. We’re mostly focused on research and writing for our next big scenario, but we’re also continuing to think about AI timelines and takeoff speeds, monitoring the evidence as it comes in, and adjusting our expectations accordingly. We’re tentatively planning on making quarterly updates to our timelines and takeoff forecasts. Since we published the AI Futures Model 3 months ago, we’ve updated towards shorter timelines. Daniel's Automated Coder (AC) median has moved from late 2029 to mid 2028, and Eli's forecast has moved a similar amount. The AC milestone is the point at which an AGI company would rather lay off all of their human software engineers than stop using AIs for software engineering. The reasons behind this change include:1 We switched to METR Time Horizon version 1.1.We included data from newly evaluated models (Gemini 3, GPT-5.2, and Claude Opus 4.6).Daniel and Eli revised their estimates for the present doubling time of the METR time horizon to be faster, from a 5.5 month median previously to 4 months for Daniel and 4.5 months for Eli. We revised it due to: (a) METR's new v1.1 trend being faster than their previous v1.0, (b) new [...] The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 2nd, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XLLjqMxETva3ABtsK/q1-2026-timelines-update Linkpost URL:https://open.substack.com/pub/aifutures1/p/q1-2026-timelines-update --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO. ---Images from the article:Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.