Toby Ord: a 2038 median for transformative AI

‘AI systems that are so capable that if they wanted to, they could take over the world … it's the deadline for alignment’

EXCERPT

ORD: "I think my median date, so my 50%, uh, kind of confidence, you know, number is, uh, 2038 for transformative AI, which is what I've been trying to forecast, which I define as, like, a really big deal. So it's quite a... It's, it's, it's somewhere towards super intelligence. I'm thinking AI systems that are so capable that if they wanted to, they could take over the world. Um, so it's the deadline for alignment. Um, and, uh, also that they're, you know, that they are moving, say, scientific and technological progress twice as fast as it was, like, prior to that. So that this is the kind of... This is, if we zoomed out into human history, this would be a time- It would show up on the graph ... that's really happening. Mm-hmm. As opposed to a time when, oh, I guess they're better than humans at a bunch of things, but they haven't really been kind of, you know, uh, there's only so much compute, though not enough to run a whole lot of copies, and yeah. Um, so I'm kind of thinking of the time when things really are getting going. It-- because I think that the, the most important role that this plays in people's thinking is, like, what's the deadline for getting impact done by? And so I think transformative AI is a kind of way to track that."

Source: 80,000 Hours · Aug 6, 2026 · 67s clip