Most of the world still thinks about AI as chatbots and better search, but today, we have systems that can outperform the smartest humans at some of our most challenging intellectual competitions. Although AI systems are still spikey and face serious weaknesses, systems that can solve such hard problems seem more like 80% of the way to an AI researcher than 20% of the way. The gap between how most people are using AI and what AI is presently capable of is immense.

AI systems that can discover new knowledge—either autonomously, or by making people more effective—are likely to have a significant impact on the world.

In just a few years, AI has gone from only being able to do tasks (in the realm of software engineering specifically) that a person can do in a few seconds to tasks that take a person more than an hour. We expect to have systems that can do tasks that take a person days or weeks soon; we do not know how to think about systems that can do tasks that would take a person centuries.

At the same time, the cost per unit of a given level of intelligence has fallen steeply; 40x per year is a reasonable estimate over the last few years!