I make the following claim: it is strikingly plausible that by 2027, models will be able to do the work of an AI researcher/engineer.
Will it happen? Your call locks at the deadline and is scored when the verdict lands. No odds, no money — just your record.
AGI by 2027 is strikingly plausible. GPT-2 to GPT-4 took us from ~preschooler to ~smart high-schooler abilities in 4 years. Tracing trendlines in compute (~0.5 orders of magnitude or OOMs/year), algorithmic efficiencies (~0.5 OOMs/year), and "unhobbling" gains (from chatbot to agent), we should expect another preschooler-to-high-schooler-sized qualitative jump by 2027.
We're on the path to individual training clusters costing $100s of billions by 2028—clusters requiring power equivalent to a small/medium US state and more expensive than the International Space Station.