Source: Astral Codex Ten
by Scott Alexander
“In 2021, a researcher named Daniel Kokotajlo published a blog post called ‘What 2026 Looks Like,’ where he laid out what he thought would happen in AI over the next five years. The world delights in thwarting would-be prophets. The sea of possibilities is too vast for anyone to ever really chart a course. At best, we vaguely gesture at broad categories of outcome, then beg our listeners to forgive us the inevitable surprises. Daniel knew all this and resigned himself to it. But even he didn’t expect what happened next. He got it all right. … A year later, OpenAI hired Daniel to their policy team. While he worked for them, he was limited in his ability to speculate publicly. … Unluckily for Sam Altman but luckily for the rest of us, Daniel broke with OpenAI mid-2024 in a dramatic split covered by the New York Times and others. He founded the AI Futures Project to produce the promised sequel …” (04/03/25)