Ryan Greenblatt: from AGI to superintelligence

‘You might get as much … 10 or more years of AI development within a year in the most extreme scenarios’

EXCERPT

GREENBLATT: "Yeah. So I would say I'm quite worried that we'll, that it will be feasible to have AI systems automate the process of AI development, and that leading to very rapid progress such that you get very, very superhuman AIs or just even significantly superhuman AIs within a short period of time. Hmm. Um, I think, you know, people have tried to do various modeling work. Like, I've tried to do various types of modeling work on this. I think the estimates are uncertain. It's hard to predict, you know, these are, of course, like uncertain future events, um, that are, that are not super well precedented. Um, but it does seem very plausible that you could have... You could go from AI systems that are sort of really good at AI R&D, not necessarily that good at other domains, and are only like, you know, competitive with the best humans at AI R&D, very quickly from there to AI systems that are very generally superhuman at everything, much faster than humans, able to, um, you know, coordinate with each other extremely well- Mm-hmm ... because just software improvement is feasible for that. So, a, a relatively extreme scenario I sometimes think about is you might, um, get as much sort of software progress or, you know, algorithms progress as we got, um, over the last, you know, 10 or more years of AI development within a year in the most extreme scenarios. I think that's not sort of my default expectation."

Source: Sam Harris · Sep 24, 2026 · 76s clip