I'm not a natural "doomsayer." But unfortunately, part of my job as an AI safety scientist is to think about the more unpleasant circumstances.
I'm like a mechanic rushing last-minute checks before Apollo 13 removes. If you request my take on the scenario, I won't discuss the quality of the in-flight entertainment, or explain how gorgeous the stars will appear from area.
I will tell you what might fail. That is what I plan to do in this story.
Now I need to clarify what this is precisely. It's not a prediction. I don't expect AI development to be this fast or as untamable as I portray. It's not pure fantasy either.
It is my worst problem.
It's a sampling from the futures that are amongst the most destructive, and I believe, disturbingly possible [1] - the ones that the majority of keep me up during the night.
I'm telling this tale due to the fact that the future is not set yet. I hope, with a bit of foresight, we can keep this story an imaginary one.
Thanks to Daniel Kokotajlo, Thomas Larsen, and Ryan Greenblatt and others for discussions that motivated these stories. This post is composed in an individual capability.
Ripples before waves
The year is 2025 and the month is February. OpenEye just recently released a brand-new AI model they call U2. The item and the name are alike. Both are increments of the past. Both are not wholly surprising.
However, unlike OpenEye's previous AI items, which lived inside the boxes of their chat windows, U2 can utilize a computer.
Some users discover it eerie to watch their internet browser flash at irregular periods and their mouse flick at inhuman speeds, as if there is a ghost at the keyboard. A fraction of employees with form-filler jobs raise the eyebrows of their managers as they fly through work nearly twice as quickly.
But by and big, U2 is still a specialized tool. To most who are paying attention, it is an animal enjoyed through the glass boxes of X (or, drapia.org if you don't like Elon, "Twitter"). Sometimes U2's wacky habits trigger a chuckle. Sometimes, they cause an anxious scratch of the chin.
Meanwhile, scientists are drawing lines on plots, as scientists like to do. The scientists try to comprehend where AI development is going. They are like Svante Arrhenius, the Swedish Physicist who saw the levels of CO2 in the environment were increasing in 1896. Like the clinical neighborhood in the time of Arrhenius, couple of professionals understand the ramifications of these lines yet.
A trend that is getting specific attention is autonomous capability. Drawing these standards out forecasts that, by the end of 2026, AI representatives will accomplish in a couple of days what the finest software application engineering professionals might do in two weeks. In a year or 2, some state, AI representatives might be able to automate 10% of remote employees.
Many are skeptical. If this held true, tech stocks would be soaring. It's too big of a splash, too quickly.
But others see what skeptics are calling 'too big a splash' a simple ripple, and see a tidal wave on the horizon.
Cloudy with a possibility of hyperbolic growth
Meanwhile, OpenEye is hectic training U3. They utilize the exact same simple dish that baked U2: Generate countless programming and math problems. Let models "believe" until they come to a response. Then enhance the traces of "thinking" that lead to A-grades.
This procedure is duplicated over and over, and as soon as the flywheel begins, it begins to spin nearly on its own. As U2 trains, it shapes more tough and sensible jobs from github repositories on the web. Models are finding out to train themselves. Long before AI agents might automate research study, a gradual sort of "self-improvement" had started.
Some engineers could still hardly believe this worked. It's like a perpetual motion device. Certainly intelligence can't emerge from a swimming pool of silicon and lightning, separated from the physical world except through the exhaust of society gushed onto the web.
And yet the benchmark numbers continue to climb day after day.
During the majority of 2024, these RL training runs cost around $1 million, sometimes $10 million. These runs were little bit more than exploratory. But by 2025, the scientists at OpenEye (and throughout the world) understood they had discovered the secret sauce. It was time to scale up.
Over the first half of 2025, $10 million RL training runs develop into $50 million runs, and after that to $100 million runs. While U2 might do a bit of data munging and run little experiments, this new model - the design scientists are calling U3 - is changing the daily lives of the technical personnel.
U3 resembles a blazing-fast intern, and engineers are learning how to wrangle its sleepless energy. Researchers flick through terminals, offering terse commands, like a CEO orchestrating staff over Slack channels.
By October 2025, U3 is writing practically all of the code at OpenEye. Researchers are practically never ever bottlenecked by execution. More than ever, compute is the lifeline of AI advancement, and the 'traffic jam' is deciding how to use it.
If advised to, U3 can run experiments, but U3 does not have actually taste as improved as human scientists at OpenEye. It has a hard time to focus on in between research concepts, so people still choose where to bore into the huge fields of algorithms to mine performance enhancements.
But these researchers are working long hours to put themselves out of a job. They need AI representatives that can plan ahead, so engineers train agents to anticipate. They hold out training information before 2024, advising designs to consider for hours to predict events in 2025. Then, they use the same technique as before, surgiteams.com distilling considering into a gut response. Forecasting ability is a broad foundation. The researchers develop specialized ML research skills on top of it, training U3 to forecast the outcomes of every ML paper and ML experiment ever taped.
The technical personnel at OpenEye are now shocked at how typically U3's suggestions seems like their most skilled peers, or when it is opaque and alien ("train on random noise before programming"), and is nevertheless proper.
The incompetencies of U3 that blocked the pipelines of research development are beginning to dissolve, and a fire-hose of optimizations is gushing out. Most experiments U3 runs are not requested by a human now. They are totally self-governing, and OpenEye's workers skim over 1% of them, possibly less.
As the cold weather of December 2025 approach, clouds roll over San Francisco in the afternoons. Once-competitive-programmers gaze out their windows, with excitement, with worry, however usually, with confusion. Their world is spinning too rapidly. It's tough to know what to do, what to state, what to take a look at on the computer screen.
Storms are brewing in Washington too. Top workers from the NSA and US cyber command collaborate with OpenEye to retrofit a form of security for U3's weights before senior leaders in China, Russia, Israel, North Korea, or Iran understand simply how important OpenEye's software application has actually ended up being.
And there's a reality still unidentified to the majority of the world - aside from in the workplaces of OpenEye and corridors of the White House and the Pentagon. It's a reality about those 'straight lines' individuals were talking about in early 2025. The lines are not straight any longer.
They are bending up.
Flip FLOP thinkers
In late 2025, U2.5 is launched. Commercial models are beginning to level up in bigger increments again. Partly, this is because progress is accelerating. Partly, it is because the models have actually ended up being a liability to OpenEye.
If U1 explains how to cook meth or writes erotica, the audiences of X would be entertained or pretend to be worried. But U2.5 is another story. Releasing this model without safeguards would resemble putting Ted Kaczynski through a PhD in how to make chemical weapons. It would resemble providing anyone with >$30K their own 200-person fraud center.
So while U2.5 had long been baked, it needed a long time to cool. But in late 2025, OpenEye is all set for a public release.
The CEO of OpenEye states, "We have attained AGI," and while lots of people believe he shifted the goalpost, the world is still impressed. U2.5 genuinely is a drop-in replacement for some (20%) of understanding employees and a game-changing assistant for [animeportal.cl](https://animeportal.cl/Comunidad/index.php?action=profile
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How aI Takeover might Happen In 2 Years LessWrong
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