Everyone underestimated AI: Benjamin Todd scores 18 months of forecasts against reality
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-10-26
Benjamin Todd (ex-80000 Hours) publishes "AI wasn't overhyped. Almost everyone underestimated it.", scoring forecasters against 18 months of progress:
- Superforecasters and the general public underestimated AI most; AI experts did better but were still too slow. Only AI CEOs were roughly right — assume what they promise in 6 months lands in 6–18 months and you'd have done well.
- Todd revisits his March 2025 piece "Will we have AGI by 2030?" that was accused of buying CEO hype, and concludes he actually underestimated progress. All four drivers — pretraining, RL, test-time compute, agent scaffolding — kept working; he had called agents "the next stage of scaling".
- Hardware evidence: in Dec 2024 researchers didn't expect a robot to beat humans at 5km until 2034; by April 2026 a humanoid broke the human half-marathon record (12:00 per 5km), and by August 2026 another ran 100m faster than Usain Bolt.
- His trend-continuation capability numbers for end-2026 were too slow; on maths, beyond-human problem solving may already be here.
Conclusion: AI wasn't overhyped — nearly everyone, including Todd, was systematically too pessimistic.
Related event: Ben Todd: AI Wasn't Overhyped—Almost Everyone Underestimated It(5 posts)→
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