Broad Timelines
Toby Ord
No-one knows when AI will begin having transformative impacts upon the world. People aren’t sure and shouldn’t be sure: there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down.
But we don’t need to wait for certainty. I want to explore what happens if we take our uncertainty seriously — if we act with epistemic humility. What does wise planning look like in a world of deeply uncertain AI timelines?
I’ll conclude that taking the uncertainty seriously has real implications for how one can contribute to making this AI transition go well. And it has even more implications for how we act together — for our portfolio of work aimed towards this end.
AI Timelines
By AI timelines, I refer to how long it will be before AI has truly transformative effects on the world. People often think about this using terms such as artificial general intelligence (AGI), human level AI, transformative AI, or superintelligence. Each term is used differently by different people, making it challenging to compare their stated timelines. Indeed even an individual’s own definition of their favoured term will be somewhat vague, such that even after their threshold has been crossed, they might have trouble specifying in which year it happened.
Many commentators have suggested this makes terms such as AGI useless, but I don’t think that is right.
I like to think of it in terms of a group of hikers seeing a mountain in the distance, towering up into the clouds and beyond, with its snowy peak catching the sun’s light. They talk animatedly about how amazing it would be to climb so high that they are inside a cloud. Or imagine being above the clouds, looking over them like an angel. After many hours of climbing, they notice there is a faint haze. Are they inside the cloud now? The mist gradually gets thicker until they can only see 10 meters ahead. Are they inside it now? Then it drops to 9 metres. Then 8. Then visibility starts to increase again. After an hour there is only the slightest haze. Are they above the clouds now? Another 30 minutes and there is no haze, and they can all agree they are above the clouds.
It is clear that at some point they were inside the cloud and sometime later were above it. And it is clear that these were sensible and useful concepts. For example, they took precautions like roping themselves together for the journey through the cloud due to the low visibility and took cameras with them because they knew they could take beautiful photos above the clouds. A lack of sharp boundaries that doesn’t make these concepts useless. But they were admittedly a lot more useful when the hikers were on the ground, planning their route, and a lot less useful in the debatable boundary zones.
I think of AGI (and human-level intelligence) as the cloud, and superintelligence as being above the cloud. They are useful concepts, despite their vagueness. But they’re markedly less useful when you get close to them.
So I think that forecasting when we’ll reach some threshold for advanced, game-changing AI makes sense. Albeit there is some inherent uncertainty due to the vagueness of the ideas, and we have to be careful when comparing our estimates to make sure we’re talking about the same version of these concepts.
Regarding AGI, it’s already getting a bit misty. In February there was a piece in Nature arguing that the current level of frontier AI should count as AGI. I’d set the bar a bit higher than that, but I agree it is already debatable whether we’re in the cloud.
For my purposes, I think the key threshold is when the system is capable enough that there are dramatic changes to the world — civilisational changes. For example, the point where AI could take over from humanity were it misaligned, or it has made 50% of people permanently unemployable, or has doubled the global rate of technological progress. Something like that. The reason I pick this point is that I think it is the one that matters most for decision-relevant planning of our strategies and careers. For many purposes we’d want our plans to pay off before we reach that point, and plans that reach fruition afterwards are likely to be significantly disrupted. I’ll refer to this as transformative AI and will make sure to show what rubric other people are using when they give their own timeline numbers.
Short vs long timelines
Discussions about timelines are usually framed as a debate between short timelines vs long timelines.
One of the most prominent supporters of very short timelines is Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic. In January 2025 he said:
Making AI that is smarter than almost all humans at almost all things will require millions of chips, tens of billions of dollars (at least), and is most likely to happen in 2026-2027.
A month later, he clarified:
Possibly by 2026 or 2027 (and almost certainly no later than 2030), the capabilities of AI systems will be best thought of as akin to an entirely new state populated by highly intelligent people appearing on the global stage—a ‘country of geniuses in a datacenter’—with the profound economic, societal, and security implications that would bring.
At the other end, a good example of long timelines is Ege Erdil, Co-founder of Epoch AI, whose median time for the ‘full automation of remote work’ is 2045 — 20 years away.
While experts continue to disagree on when AI will start having transformative impacts, they are clearly not stubbornly ignoring the evidence. For as Helen Toner explained in her great essay: ‘Long’ timelines to advanced AI have gotten crazy short. Before ChatGPT, short timelines used to mean something like ‘10 to 20 years, so since it could take a long time to prepare, we should start now’. Long timelines used to mean ‘there was no sign AGI will happen in the next 30 years, if it happened this century at all, so it is premature to do any work related to controlling advanced AI’. But now we see short timelines like Dario Amodei’s with genius level AI ‘almost certain’ to happen within the next 5 years, and many staunch proponents of long timelines are now saying we’ll reach human-level in just 10 or 20 years.
Here’s a nice graph 80,000 Hours put together of how the average forecasted time until AGI on the Metaculus prediction site has shortened from about 50 years to about 5 years in just a 5-year window:
Broad Timelines
So everyone is updating on the evidence and shortening their timelines, yet substantial disagreement remains.
This is often framed as a debate: that we should be trying to assess who is right — whether timelines really are short or long (or medium). People pick winners, affiliate with one side or the other, and rub it in whenever the latest evidence favours their preferred camp.
My central claim today is that for most of us, that is the wrong frame. You should have neither short timelines nor long timelines — but broad timelines. That is:
The correct epistemic response to the lasting expert disagreement is to have a broad distribution over AI timelines.
First, there is too much disagreement among very smart and informed people for it to be reasonable to have a narrow range of possible years. You would need to ascribe very little chance to some of your epistemic peers seeing things more clearly than you do, when that actually happens half the time. Moreover, a lot of these people are coming from different fields, bearing diverse insights, evidence, and time-tested heuristics that no single individual is in a good position to judge.
And second, many of these people themselves have a broad distribution over AI timelines. For example, take Daniel Kokotaljo. He is one of the authors of AI 2027 and is known for as a leading figure in the short timelines camp. A few years back, his median date for AI systems “able to replace 99% of current fully remote jobs” was 2027, hence the name of the scenario. Though his timelines have lengthened a little and by the time they were writing it, 2027 had become more of an illustrative early scenario rather than his point where it was 50% likely to have arrived.
Kokotaljo has done a great job of being extremely transparent about his timelines, showing his predictions (along with their uncertainty) for a variety of different levels of powerful AI. Here is his current probability distribution for when we will have an AI system that is “At least as good as top human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks”:
His distribution has its peak (the mode) in 2028, but because the distribution is heavily skewed towards the right, there is only a 27% chance of it happening by that point. His median year is 2030. And his 80% interval (from the 10th to 90th centile) is from 2027 to some point after 2050.
This is a broad distribution. I think someone’s 80% interval is a decent way of expressing the range of times they think are credible. Here Kokotaljo is saying that it will likely happen between 1 and 25 years from now, but that there is a 1 in 5 chance that it doesn’t even fall into that wide range.
He’s not the only one with such a broad distribution. Here are the forecasts of Daniel Kokotaljo, Ajeya Cotra, and Ege Erdil from 2023, forecasting: “In what year would AI systems be able to replace 99% of current fully remote jobs?”:
Note that all three have the same kind of shape, just stretched differently. And despite their very different medians they actually have a lot of overlap (which this transparent shading brings out). This shows both that each expert has a broad distribution and that the expert community on the whole has an even broader one. Indeed, I think you could do a lot worse than just taking a mixture model of these three experts’ views. Interestingly, since 2023, Kokotaljo’s distribution has shifted to the right and Erdil’s to the left.
Here’s an illustrative distribution for AGI timelines used by Ben Todd of 80,000 Hours:
Dwarkesh Patel reproduced it on his post about AI timelines, saying that it pretty much represented his own uncertainty, giving his median date of 2032 for AI that “learns on the job as easily, organically, seamlessly, and quickly as a human, for any white-collar work.”
Here is Metaculus’s current community estimate for when AGI will be developed. Synthesizing the community’s collective uncertainty, it is very broad and has this same characteristic shape:
Here is Epoch AI’s summary of leading estimates of AI timelines from 2023:
These look a bit different as they are represented as cumulative probabilities of reaching transformative AI by a given time. But they are all very broad. Take a look at the range of years between when they cross 10% to when they cross 90%. Every single one has an 80%-interval at least 50 years wide.
What about researchers working on AI capabilities? Grace et al surveyed thousands of AI researchers who were presenting at their top academic conferences. They surveyed the researchers in 2022 (blue) and 2023 (red) about when “unaided machines can accomplish every task better and more cheaply than human workers”:
You can see the wild variation in individual forecasts (the thin lines) and that the timelines became about 30% shorter in a single year. But vast uncertainty remains. The aggregate community forecasts (the thick lines) have 80% intervals ranging from years to centuries.
I think everyone should have a distribution that is roughly this shape. Here’s mine:
It is for transformative AI, loosely defined as AI that would be powerful enough to take over the world were it misaligned, and which is doubling the rate of scientific and technological progress. It’s a similar shape to Kokotaljo’s, but broader, with a median of 2038 and an 80% interval ranging from 3 years to 100 years.
Let’s return to where we started, with Daniel Kokotaljo’s distribution for AI that is “At least as good as top human experts at virtually all cognitive tasks”:
While we often express our timelines as single numbers (such as the mode or the median), I don’t think that’s a helpful approach here. Look at that graph. What number sums it up? Its only real feature is the peak, but Kokotaljo is saying it is unlikely to happen by then (just a 27% chance). The median is often a better number to give, but here it is at a relatively undistinguished point on the graph (in 4 years’ time) and saying ‘4 years’ would obscure his point that he thinks there is a 10% chance it is within 1 year and a 10% chance it is beyond 25 years.
I think that if he talked through what he actually means by this distribution with a smart policy maker, they would finally get it and say:
Oh, so you are saying you have no idea when it will happen — it could be next year, or it could be 6 presidential terms from now. And you’re saying there is a 1 in 5 chance it isn’t even in that range.
I think that’s actually a pretty good summary, and it would sum up my own distribution as well. While ‘no idea when it will happen’ is underselling the information contained in this distribution, it is a much better summary than ‘4 years’ which would be understood by almost everyone as something like ‘between 3 and 5 years’. While academics might hope people interpret a named year as the median time, most people interpret it as the moment they are allowed to start complaining the predicted event hasn’t happened yet.
Indeed, these distributions are so hard to sum up with a single number, that I think a substantial amount of disagreement on timelines stems from people describing different parts of the same elephant. For example, both AI boosters and those concerned with existential risk talk a lot about short timelines because ‘we could see the world transformed in just a few years time’. It isn’t that they think we will see that, but that it is big if true, and has a decent chance of being true. In contrast, more conservative voices tend to focus on later years saying ‘it is more likely that it will take 10 to 20 years, than that it will take a just a few’ (focusing on straight probability without weighting by importance or leverage).
Both of these can be true at the same time. Both are true on my own distribution.
A particular danger in communicating timelines with a single number is that it raises the chance that this named year will come and go without incident, and the people who mentioned it (or the wider community they are part of) will be written off as having a false or discredited view. I think we’re going to see some of this come 2027 due to the vast number of people who heard about that scenario, combined with the fact that so many media outlets reported it as a sharp prediction, rather than as it was intended: an important illustrative scenario.
As well as being bad for communication, compressing one’s uncertainty into a single number would be very bad for your own planning.
For example Kokotaljo’s distribution implies a 28% chance transformative AI will happen during the current presidential term, a 35% chance it will happen in the next term, a 13% chance it will be the one after that, with 24% left over spread among ever more distant terms:
These are very different scenarios and it would clearly be a mistake to just act as if the second one were correct since it is the most likely. That would eliminate the possibility of hedging against transformative AI coming soon, and of taking advantage of worlds where it comes late.
Implications
Rather than attempting to adjudicate which length of timelines is correct, I think we should be taking the frame of how to act (or plan) under deeply uncertain timelines.
That is, we should be treating this as an exercise in rational decision-making under uncertainty — in a situation where the stakes are high and the uncertainty is vast.
Let’s unpack some of the implications of this frame.
We’ll start with two mistakes that are all too common in the policy world.
First, uncertainty about AI timelines isn’t an excuse to just believe whichever timeline you want, so long as it is within the credible range. Sadly, I think many government ministers are likely to take this approach if an expert explains this broad uncertainty to them. While they would be right that the evidence isn’t sufficient to disprove their preferred timeline, it would be irresponsible of them to not allow for other credible possibilities. That would be like a mayor hearing there is a 20% chance the volcano next to their town erupts next year and feeling that they can continue to act as if it won’t, since it not erupting is also found credible by the experts. Uncertainty isn’t an excuse to assume a plausible outcome of your choice will occur, it is more that rationality requires you to respect every plausible outcome.
Second, we can’t just wait until the uncertainty is resolved. Sometimes that works, but here we know the uncertainty is very unlikely to be resolved until the events are upon us. At that stage it will be too late to enact all but the most knee-jerk responses. So feeling that the cloud of uncertainty gives you permission to delay acting is tantamount to committing to choose one of the bluntest and least effective options available.
Instead, we are going to need to act under uncertainty, taking into account the full range of credible possibilities.
How can we do that?
Hedging
A natural and important idea is that of hedging against transformative AI coming soon —while we are least prepared. We could do that by shifting our portfolio of activities (or your individual contribution to humanity’s portfolio) to focus somewhat more on short timelines than the raw probabilities would warrant.
This makes a lot of sense. I strongly recommend governments, civil society, and academics do more to hedge against transformative AI coming early.
Though when it comes to the communities of professionals already working on helping the AI transition go well, I think they are already hedging strongly against early transformative AI. Indeed, there is even a risk that they are going beyond mere hedging, and are actively betting on it coming early. I’m not sure, as it is hard to know the full portfolio of work.
One certainly sees many more pleas for work aimed at very short timelines than for long timelines. But there are also strong reasons to consider long timelines in our planning, and ways in which work aimed at long timelines can also be extremely high leverage.
Let’s look at two key things that happen when timelines are longer.
A Different World
In longer timelines, AI arrives in a world that doesn’t look like today. The longer it is until transformative AI appears, the more different the world will be at that key moment.
As a baseline, suppose it arrives soon, in 2028. Things will definitely be different to today, but we’d expect many of the broad brushstrokes to be similar. We would likely have the same US president, the same major players, the same main technologies. If transformative AI arrived within just two years, I’d bet it was something like the AI 2027 story where a lab recklessly got recursive self-improvement going.
Now suppose transformative AI arrives in 2035. That is not this presidential term or even the next one, but the one after that. Who knows who’d be in power, or what state the US would be in. The nine years would likely have seen major changes in the core technologies of AI (9 years before now there were no LLMs or transformers). We could well have different leading AI companies, perhaps as a result of a bubble having burst and taken out the overextended first-movers.
By 2035, export controls may well have backfired, helping China get ahead on chips by incentivising them to build out their own chip industry and giving them 13 years to get good at it. This was a key dynamic the White House considered while drafting the export controls, but they were focused on shorter timelines… By 2035, China may have also invaded Taiwan, depriving the West of their biggest source of chips.
By 2035, there may be double-digit unemployment from increasingly powerful AI systems and public sentiment about AI could be very strong. The Overton window for AI regulation will be in a very different place.
As may be the geopolitical order. The last nine years has seen the invasion of Ukraine, the increasing isolation of the US and a global pandemic. Another nine years could see a similar amount of change.
And if we haven’t played our cards right, those of us working on avoiding catastrophic risks from AI may have also lost a lot of power, with our ideas about AI risk being seen as discredited since so many years have passed without the truly transformative effects we were talking about.
In short, the longer the timelines the more different things will be — both in some systematic, predictable ways, and just from random diffusion and chaos. So taking longer timelines seriously means:
Being more open to approaches that wouldn’t work in the world as it is today,
Being less excited about approaches that are tailored to specifics of the today’s world,
Being less happy to compromise your values to appeal to those currently in control of companies and governments,
Being less willing to say things that will make people feel our position is discredited if we end up in a long timeline world,
And spending less time following the daily news about what has just happened in AI or who is ahead.
Longterm actions
There are many kinds of things people can work on that can pay off handsomely, but only after a number of years. Things like:
Founding and nurturing a new research field
Founding an organisation or company
Building a movement or community
Writing a book
Foundational research
Completing a PhD
A major career change
Climbing the ladder in a large organisation or government
Training promising students in AI Safety or AI Governance
If you just consider your impact during the next three years, most of these will be beaten by other shorter-term options. But as the years climb, longer-term options can have very high value. They aren’t always best, but for the right people or the right opportunities, they can be extremely impactful.
When I was a grad student, I realised how much good I could achieve if I donated much of my income over my career to help those in the poorest countries. And the more I thought about it, the more I thought I should start something — an organisation — to help other people to do this too. So Will MacAskill and I launched Giving What We Can in 2009. 17 years later, more than 10,000 people have joined us, having thousands of times as much impact as if I’d carried on alone.
This kind of compounding growth is one of the major ways that longer term projects can have very large multipliers, giving us a very big boost to our impact if timelines are in fact long.
Starting new fields can be similar. When I first met Allan Dafoe 10 years ago, I didn’t know what he was talking about when spoke of ‘AI governance’ — a new field he was trying to found. Now it is a burgeoning field, with hundreds of practitioners, who are in high demand from many different governments.
When I started writing The Precipice, I wasn’t sure I should, because I thought AGI might just be too close. But as it turns out, there was time to write it and for it to have a real impact. I’m really glad I did, as I meet so many amazing people working on the biggest risks who tell me it was reading The Precipice that inspired them to do so. I think it is one of the best things I’ve done.
After it came out, I used to think that there just wasn’t enough time to write a further book — that we were really too close to the critical moment. We might be, but I think I was mistaken about the strength of this argument. The time horizon for a book to have real impact is about 5 years (time to plan the book, win a book deal, write the book, wait for publishers to publish it, then wait a year or more before it has sufficient impact in the world).
But I only think there is about a 1 in 5 chance of transformative AI coming in the next 5 years. So while a book may come out too late, that is only a 1 in 5 chance, leaving a book project with 80% as much expected value as I’d have naively calculated. So while there is a 1 in 5 chance I’d be kicking myself, on my views about AI timelines there isn’t actually that much of a haircut in expected value due to the chance it is too late.
That said, the chance of transformative AI arriving before your work pays off is only one factor affecting whether you should do work aiming at short or long timelines. Another is that AI safety and governance are likely to be more neglected now than they will be later. This creates an extra multiplier for the value of direct work in these areas now, and in some cases is a larger effect than the chance your work comes to fruition after transformative AI.
Overall, I think that longer term projects do get down-weighted by these considerations, but their advantages sometimes outweigh that — especially if they are shooting for a very big payoff. I’d guess that if someone looked at their options and thought the best option was one that took 5 to 10 years to pay off, then about half the time it would remain their best option even after taking AI timelines into consideration. After all, it is not uncommon for your best option to be several times better than your second best.
So I think the community of people working on transformative AI are likely underrating types of work that need five or more years in order to pay off. The ideal portfolio of activities aimed at making the AI transition go well should include a number of things that really help us succeed in worlds where we get longer to try.
But I want to stress that none of this implies we can slack off.
We’re in a race against AI timelines. It is just that we don’t know if that race is a sprint or a marathon. In either case, time is of the essence.
Conclusions
We have seen that there is substantial disagreement and uncertainty about when AI will start having transformative impacts on the world. This is because there just isn’t enough evidence to pin it down. My claim is that for the purposes of planning we should adopt neither short nor long timelines, but broad timelines:
The correct epistemic response to the lasting expert disagreement is to have a broad distribution over AI timelines.
Given this deep uncertainty we need to act with epistemic humility. We have to take seriously the possibility it will come soon and hedge against that. But we also have to take seriously the possibility that it comes late and take advantage of the opportunities that would afford us. The world at large is doing too little of the former, but those of us who care most about making the AI transition go well might be doing too little of the latter.
We need to take more seriously the possibility that the world will look very different at that time, which should broaden our own Overton windows about what kinds of plans could succeed. And we shouldn’t be ruling out all actions which take a long time to pay off. Even if they wouldn’t help in short timelines worlds, some actions more than make up for this with substantial impacts if timelines are long.
Funders, career advisors, and movement builders should be thinking about this with regards to how we act as a community: to the shape of the whole portfolio of work aimed at effectively improving the world. And each of us should be reflecting on what this deeply uncertain timing means for planning our own contributions over the years to come.
9 March 2026