As we learn more about AI progress (o3 scoring 25.2% on the *very* difficult FrontierMath benchmark), views on AGI timelines seem to be diverging, not converging. In a post that was fun to write, I sketch fast and slow timelines and flag some signals to watch for. (Link in 🧵)

A Christmas Eve update on The Black Spatula Project: the community is off to a roaring start. Dozens of participants contributing ideas, refining prompts, finding errors in papers, and more. Join us in a fun and easy opportunity to improve science! amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/black-spat...

@emollick.bsky.social recently noted the weirdly uneven nature of AI announcements – "Here is a tool to accelerate science. It also talks like Santa". This reflects an underlying reality: AI capabilities and adoption are both wildly uneven. I discuss in my latest post (link below).

I was wrestling with how to approach a post about timelines, and then the one of those opening sentences that defines the entire essay popped into my head:

How the fuck did we wind up in a situation where it's impossible to tell whether AGI is just 3 years away?

TFW deciding whether to spend ten minutes reading an article about how we all have too many things competing for our attention

@sebk.bsky.social
identified a key source of disagreement on AI policy: wildly divergent views of AI's impact. Arguments seem to stem from conflicting values – profits and progress vs. safety and status quo. But often, the real disagreement is unstated factual assumptions regarding the future.