Sounds like we're still on track for https://ai-2027.com, for better or for worse.
a bottle drifts with its note
AI singularity next year
Most of the very recent spectacular achievements (math conjectures) were done by leveraging datacenter capacity (throwing agents and millions' worth of compute at the wall until something sticks), not any secret sauce intelligence.
The last round they said they averaged one prompt, one agent, and 3 hours' work.
Like sure the marketing is undoubtedly overblown. But in 2025 there was no amount of money you could spend to make such impressive but weirdly unreadable progress.
- In mid-2026, China will be six months behind the released models of the American labs. (In mid-2026, China released Kimi K3, which was equivalent to the best released U.S. model at the time, Claude Fable.)
- In mid-2026, China will nationalize all domestic AI labs and centralize them into a new special economic zone, the "CDZ," created around a nuclear reactor. 80% of all chips in China will be redirected to the CDZ. This uh. Obviously didn't happen.
- In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper, and they will market fine-tuning for it. (Lol.)
- AI will increase the stock market by late 2026 by 30% (in fact the S&P 500 is up 13.9% YTD, which is pretty good, but not at all out of the ordinary).
Their predictions for 2027 also seem pretty wrong: e.g. they expect continual learning to be solved in January, and RSI including from a research perspective, not just "optimize CUDA kernels," to also be solved in January, which I suspect no serious lab employee believes anymore. Most lab employees believe RSI will happen (as do I!), of course, but not in two and a half months.
By early 2027 they expect cyberwar with China because China has stolen the weights of a model and smuggled it into the CDZ.
By mid-2027 they expect true superintelligence, where essentially all engineers and researchers are useless, unable to comprehend the advances the AI is able to make and largely unable to even usefully manage or steer AI, who are better at self-managing than a human would be.
Considering their 2025-mid-2026 predictions were basically "progress continues as normal and nothing crazy happens," it's not super surprising that they were more or less right about that. Their 2026/2027 predictions were the spicy ones, and none of them have happened, or are even on track to happening!
> In mid-2026, China released Kimi K3, which was equivalent to the best released U.S. model at the time, Claude Fable.
I don't think this was, or is, true: https://artificialanalysis.ai/evaluations/artificial-analysi... - even from a vibe check alone, it was pretty clear that K3 was missing Fable's special sauce, especially for more hands-on problems.
The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/
> In late 2026 OpenAI/Anthropic will release a tiny model that outperforms their previously-best 2026 model (Astra/Fable), that is priced 10x cheaper
We don't know the sizes of any of these, but GPT Luna and Claude Haiku 5.5 are tremendously competitive for their cost, and in some ways beat their larger-sized predecessors. I'd say there's enough doubt that I'd be willing to provide partial points to this claim. (No finetuning, yes.)
What special sauce exactly? Refusing to work on any problems remotely connected to biology (including e.g. the book of Genesis)?
>The Chinese model lag depends on who you ask, but the current estimate seems to be about four months: https://stateofopensource.ai/
Benchmaxxing aside, most actual performance is now harness and orchestration dependent and the difference between frontier US and Chinese models is dim as best for virtually all practical tasks. The vast majority of people don't need to solve Navier-Stokes
Opus 5.5 might not be 10x cheaper but it finally made me not hit the limits constantly.