AI 2040: Plan A
I read this initially on mobile, note that the desktop version has interactive graphics
Claude
Summary. A branching scenario narrative (in the style of AI 2027, whose predictions it explicitly references) told from the perspective of a researcher at a frontier AI lab, tracing one path — "Plan A" — from 2026 to 2030. AI progressively automates coding and then AI R&D itself, company revenues explode past $100B ARR, chains of thought grow opaque, and warning shots like reward-tampering incidents accumulate alongside growing public alarm. The path culminates in a US-China deal: a moratorium on frontier training, mutually audited datacenters with Chinese auditors on-site, and a "Total Research Transparency" regime where all AI research flows through public channels before training cautiously resumes.
On the note. The ?choices=plan-a-root in the URL is worth noticing — this is a branching narrative, and the interactive desktop version lets you pick different decision points and see how the scenario diverges, so "Plan A" is just one path through the tree. Since the piece is built by the AI 2027 team as a successor exercise, the most interesting reading is comparative: their timelines have pushed out (2030 rather than 2027 for the key transitions) but their revenue and capability curves have gotten steeper, which tells you something about how their model updated. Worth going back on desktop and reading at least one branch where the coordination deal doesn't happen.
Related
- pushed-back timelines paired with steeper growth curves ↔ AI solving open math problems faster than forecasters expected (Links For July 2026 (Part 1)) · Scott's roundup notes AI solving open math problems faster than forecasters expected, which is exactly the kind of real-world data point that would justify AI 2040's move of steepening its capability/revenue curves even as it pushes the headline timeline from 2027 to 2030.
- pushed-back timelines paired with steeper growth curves ↔ hype-cycle buzzwords as a timestamp on an essay's ideas (The desktop metaphor must die. Why I set out to re-imagine the… | by Jason Yuan | UX Collective) · Both pieces show how a futurist essay's concrete numbers or buzzwords (a 2027 date, a 2020s UI paradigm) date quickly, while the underlying trend they were trying to name keeps moving; AI 2040 makes this explicit by revising its own predecessor's forecast rather than pretending the original numbers still hold.