Ex-OpenAI Researcher Predicts Full AI R&D Automation by Mid-2029
daniel_c0deb0t · x · 2026-08-12
Former OpenAI researcher RyanGreenblatt predicts the median timeline for full automation of AI R&D is late 2030/early 2031, but his best guess (modal prediction) is significantly earlier, around mid-2029.
He outlines a specific timeline for the next few years:
- EOY 2026: Frontier AI progress hits 1.5x that of 2025, accelerating AI R&D labor at companies like Anthropic by 2.5x.
- EOY 2027: Engineering at AI companies approaches full automation with serious inroads into research, boosting R&D labor by 8.5x. Humans will often be very out of the loop.
This discussion stems from a debate on recursive self-improvement (RSI) with Dwarkesh Patel, exploring whether AI will slingshot to tens of billions of superintelligences shortly after reaching human-level intelligence.
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