80,000 Hours' "Will we have AGI by 2030?": the original essay behind the retro
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-09-22
Ben Todd shares the link to his March 2025 essay "Will we have AGI by 2030?" on 80,000 Hours, referenced by his forecast review thread.
The essay analyzes four engines of recent AI progress (pretraining, RL post-training, longer thinking time, better agents) and notes how leading AI CEOs turned bullish in early 2025: Sam Altman said OpenAI was confident it knows how to build AGI, Dario Amodei cited 2-3 years to powerful capabilities, and Demis Hassabis moved from "as soon as 10 years" to "3-5 years." It also examines compute bottlenecks around 2030 and two potential futures in the critical five-year window.
Related event: Ben Todd Reviews His AGI-by-2030 Forecast: Mostly on Track but Slower(2 posts)→
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