What the hell happened with AGI timelines in 2026? – Rob Wiblin
About this episode
Rob Wiblin discusses the shifting perspectives on AGI timelines and the evidence of AI acceleration.
Last October, famed coder Andrej Karpathy called AI agents “slop.” Two months later he completely reversed his view , describing them as “alien tools” that are “rocking the profession.” He was far from alone in his whiplash. Six months ago, host Rob Wiblin recorded a video explaining why so many AI experts had longer timelines to AGI than a year earlier. By the time he clicked publish, another huge vibe shift was well underway. Evidence of AI acceleration has piled up since: Models now complete software engineering tasks that would take human professionals a full day — improving faster than our measurements can even keep up. Anthropic’s revenue is growing at an annualised 8,400%, a trend so steep it would hit the whole world's GDP in 2028 if it continued. AI models are making breakthroughs in famous mathematics puzzles. And according to Anthropic, Claude now writes 80% of their code and is itself a key contributor to making itself smarter. While legitimately impressive, Rob isn’t entirely sold. Going through each point carefully he finds this evidence is less decisive than it looks at first glance. And key gaps remain, such as models struggling with complex, real-world tasks. He…
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