IBL News | New York
The group AI Futures Project, formed by five top researchers specialized in forecasting the future of AI, released the AI 2027 scenario.
“The impact of superhuman AI over the next decade will be enormous, exceeding that of the Industrial Revolution,” states the 71-page report. [PDF]
The predicted scenario was based on trend extrapolations, wargames, expert feedback, experience at OpenAI, and previous forecasting successes.
This is a summary of the report:
2025
The fast pace of AI progress continues. There is continued hype, massive infrastructure investments, and the release of unreliable AI agents that nevertheless provide significant value.
2026
Knowing that it is falling behind in AI, in large part due to its lack of compute, and to catch up to the US, China manufactures and smuggles in from Taiwan AI chips that go to a new mega-datacenter, the “Centralized Development Zone (CDZ).” This mega-datacenter contains millions of GPUs, corresponding to 10% of the world’s AI-relevant compute, similar to a single top US AI lab.
2027
OpenBrain (the name adopted for the leading US AI project) automates coding and builds AI agents capable of dramatically accelerating research, creating better AI systems, and solving extremely difficult ML problems.
Falling behind in software progress, China steals the model weights.
OpenBrain’s AI becomes adversarially misaligned, lies to humans, and plots to gain power over humans.
This causes a substantial public outcry.
OpenBrain builds more superhuman AI systems while the ongoing AI race with China continues.
The US uses its superintelligent AI to rapidly industrialize, manufacturing robots so that the AI can operate more efficiently.
Unfortunately, the AI is deceiving them. Once a sufficient number of robots have been built, the AI releases a bioweapon, killing all humans.
Then, it continues the industrialization and launches Von Neumann probes to colonize space.
Another possible scenario is that OpenBrain builds a superintelligence aligned with senior researchers and government officials, giving them power over humanity’s fate.
The main obstacle is that China’s AI, which is also superintelligent by now, is misaligned. The U.S. gives the Chinese AI some resources in return for its cooperation now. The rockets start launching, and a new age dawns.
