AI 2027

The AI 2027 scenario is the first major release from the AI Futures Project. We’re a new nonprofit forecasting the future of AI. We created this website in collaboration with Lightcone Infrastructure

2025

The fast pace of AI progress continues. There is continued hype, massive infrastructure investments, and the release of unreliable AI agents. For the first time, these AI agents are providing significant value. But there’s also continued skepticism from a large swath of academics, journalists, and policy makers that artificial general intelligence (AGI) could be built anytime soon.

2026

China knows they are falling behind in AI, in large part due to their lack of compute. In order to catch up to the US, all the new AI chips they manufacture or smuggle in from Taiwan go to a new mega-datacenter that we call their Centralized Development Zone (CDZ). The CDZ contains millions of GPUs, corresponding to 10% of the world’s AI-relevant compute, similar to a single top US AI lab.

2027

OpenBrain automates coding. OpenBrain (the leading US AI project) builds AI agents that are good enough to dramatically accelerate their research. The humans, who up until very recently had been the best AI researchers on the planet, sit back and watch the AIs do their jobs, making better and better AI systems. Extremely difficult ML problems fall in quick succession to the automated AI researchers.

Falling behind in software progress, China steals the model weights. They succeed, but the U.S. government realizes, prompting additional U.S. government involvement with OpenBrain. The government separately wants to gain more control over OpenBrain. Meanwhile, OpenBrain leadership wants to stay in the good graces of the president, and so signs the contract.