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AI systems are about to start building themselves. What does that mean?
I’m writing this post because when I look at all the publicly available information I reluctantly come to the view that there’s a likely chance (60%+) that no-human-involved AI R&D – an AI system powerful enough that it could plausibly autonomously build its own successor – happens by the end of 2028. This is a big deal. I don’t know how to wrap my head around it. It’s a reluctant view because the implications are so large that I feel dwarfed by them, and I’m not sure society is ready for the kinds of changes implied by achieving automated AI R&D. I now believe we are living in the time that AI research will be end-to-end automated. If that happens, we will cross a Rubicon into a nearly-impossible-to-forecast future. More on this later.
The purpose of this essay is to enumerate why I think the takeoff towards fully automated AI R&D is happening. I’ll discuss some of the consequences of this, but mostly I expect to spend the majority of this essay discussing the evidence for this belief, and will spend most of 2026 working through the implications.
