Crosspost from my blog.

[Previously: "Views on when AGI comes and on strategy to reduce existential risk", "Do confident short timelines make sense?"]

[Whenever discussing when AGI will come, it bears repeating: If anyone builds AGI, everyone dies; no one knows when AGI will be made, whether soon or late; a bunch of people and orgs are trying to make it; and they should stop and be stopped.]

Arguments for fast AGI progress

Many arguments about "when will AGI come" focus on reasons to think progress will continue quickly, such as:

Line go up.
Researchers can pivot to address new obstacles and ditch dead ends.
AI can be used to accelerate AI research.
We're over a threshold of economic returns, such that AI research will permanently see much more investment than before.

Intuition pumps for being close to AGI

These are all valid and truly worrying. But, to say anything specific and confident about when (in clock time) AGI will come, we'd also have to know how fast progress is being made in an absolute sense; specifically, in an absolute sense as measured by "how much of [...]

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Outline:

(00:40) Arguments for fast AGI progress

(01:11) Intuition pumps for being close to AGI

(03:36) Synthetic life as an intuition pump

(04:55) Some things I like about this analogy

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First published:
February 24th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wgqcExv9AgN5MuJuY/bioanchors-2-electric-bacilli

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Bioanchors 2: Electric Bacilli” by TsviBT

LessWrong (30+ Karma)