u/ddp26

I looked at AGI forecasters who have published two or more precise predictions over the past three years, all using similar definitions of AGI. The shared definition is "most purely cognitive labor is automatable at better quality, speed, and cost than humans." For some of these researchers, saying they use this definition is a bit of a stretch, but I included everyone who I judged as close enough to be informative.

The graphic specifically shows predictions for when most cognitive labor will be fully automated. (Icons are medians, with approximate confidence intervals.)

So are the best AI forecasters updating the same way that I posted about earlier this week, with Daniel Kokotajlo and Eli Lifland pushing their AGI timelines out during 2025, but then pulling them back in early 2026 given the rapid progress from Anthropic?

I think the data supports this impression which could even be characterized as in the ChatGPT era, people updated towards AI coming sooner. Then in the xAI, Meta, and Gemini era, people updated towards it coming later. Then in the Anthropic era, people updated towards AI coming sooner. 

We've reached a point where Matt Levine's joke is literally the business model: The perfect AI startup has two assets: a speculative chance to "build God" and elite researchers who refuse to discuss how they'll make money.

I thought it would be fun to forecast hypothetical seed-round valuations for 80 prominent AI researchers who haven't yet founded AGI companies. The top of the list is dominated by current/former OpenAI researchers:

Noam Brown (OpenAI, o1/reasoning): $6.7B

Jakub Pachocki (OpenAI): $6.2B

Alec Radford (OpenAI, GPT-1/2, CLIP, Whisper, DALL-E): $4.3B

Mark Chen (OpenAI): $2.8B

A note on the image: white dot is the median; bar is the 50% confidence interval; whiskers are the 80% confidence interval. All forecasted using the FutureSearch app.

And for context, Sutskever’s SSI was valued at $5B at seed and is now reportedly worth $32B. Murati raised at $12B. LeCun at $4.5B. And these valuations aren't hypotheticals!

A non-obvious top contender to me was Geoffrey Hinton ($5.8B.) The godfather of deep learning starting an AGI lab at this stage would be wild but presumably it would be SSI-style, safety-focused, and I assume much of the value comes from knowing the researchers he'd attract. More realistically, I also looked into who is actually most likely to do it. Noam Brown and Jakub Pachocki stand out, mostly because people love leaving OpenAI, but Jason Wei at Meta is another likely candidate.

But the window for researcher + AGI narrative + no business model being fundable must be closing, right? It will be interesting to see who else leaves before investors grow tired of this pitch.

Whether Grok's subscriber trajectory justifies roughly a fifth of the entire valuation pretty much determines whether this IPO is a slight premium or a significant overpay. Full analysis: https://futuresearch.ai/spacex-ipo-valuation/