Geoffrey Irving: a 2–3-year modal path to superintelligence

‘We've seen such rapid progress in the last couple of years that could continue to go very quickly and keep speeding up’

EXCERPT

REED: "That makes sense. You've said before that your modal expectation is that we get full-blown super intelligence within something like two to three years. Could you walk me through what that looks like? Yeah. So I think the main uncertainty here is, uh, are the models going to be good not just at kind of verifiable tasks with kind of clean rewards, but also fuzzier things, kind of intuition, kind of let's just like, like fuzzy planning, this kind of thing. And I think people are over-weighting the probability that they're only good at the verifiable part. And if that is wrong, then I think we have seen so much progress over the last while, that while the softer things lag, I don't think they lag by, by years. Say they lag by like a smaller amount of time, and that I think can carry us kind of quite far in the next few years. And we've seen such rapid progress in the last couple of years, um, that that could continue to go very quickly and keep speeding up. I think it could be slower, and I'm, I'm hoping it's slower. That would be a lot... That would be very nice. But that's sort of the, the, the worry."

Source: 80,000 Hours · Aug 11, 2026 · 62s clip