AI Authors on the Future of AI

In the largest survey of its kind, we surveyed 2,778 researchers who had published in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) venues, asking for their predictions on the pace of AI progress and the nature and impacts of advanced AI systems. The aggregate forecasts give at least a 50 percent chance of AI systems achieving several milestones by 2028, including autonomously constructing a payment processing site from scratch, creating a song indistinguishable from a new song by a popular musician, and autonomously downloading and fine-tuning a large language model. If science continues undisrupted, the chance of unaided machines outperforming humans in every possible task was estimated at 10 percent by 2027, and 50 percent by 2047. There was disagreement about whether faster or slower AI progress would be better for the future of humanity. However, there was broad agreement that research aimed at minimizing potential risks from AI systems ought to be prioritized more.