Jack Clark at Import AI:
I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.
The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.
In terms of timing, I don’t expect this to happen in 2026. But I think we could see an example of a “model end-to-end trains it successor” within a year or two – certainly a proof-of-concept at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may be harder (they’re a lot more expensive and are the product of a lot of humans working extremely hard).
My reasoning for this stems primarily from public information: papers on arXiv, bioRxiv, and NBER, as well as observing the products being deployed into the world by the frontier companies.
More here.
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