I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligence
I’ve often been surprised when I hear from top researchers in industry that they think AI will be better than them at their job in a few years, and I didn’t really know why I doubted it.
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Key points
- The explanation I arrived at is that researchers are seeing this massive acceleration in the infra and engineering capabilities of the models.
- Research is much easier today now that we have coding agents.
- It’s also not the first transition the field has seen across the balance in if AI is more “research” or “engineering.” Before deep learning took off, AI was also far more of a research endeavor.
- Some call this RSI, but a more grounded form is simply “parallelized, AI-assisted language modeling.” You don’t need to buy into takeoff scenarios to see just how much infrastructure improvements are coming, and how this’ll change the nature of working in AI.
Sources (1)
- [1]I expect rapid progress but not towards general superintelligenceInterconnects (Nathan Lambert) · Oct 9, 09:33 PM
I’ve often been surprised when I hear from top researchers in industry that they think AI will be better than them at their job in a few years, and I didn’t really know why I doubted it.
The explanation I arrived at is that researchers are seeing this massive acceleration in the infra and engineering capabilities of the models.
Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.
Before this
- Oct 8, 2026Google brings agentic AI to Gemini, starting with businesses
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- Oct 8, 2026Nvidia, Samsung back $90M round for AI agent startup Nous Research
- Oct 8, 2026Building on our commitment to American scientific discovery
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