Katja Grace

“Researchers believe there is a 50% chance of AI outperforming humans in all tasks in 45 years (i.e. by about 2061, counting from the 2016 survey) and of automating all human jobs in 120 years.”

Aggregate forecast of 352 machine learning researchers surveyed in 2016; North American respondents gave 74 years versus 30 years for respondents from Asia.

“Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as translating languages (by 2024) — i.e. a 50% chance that machines will 'perform translation about as good as a human who is fluent in both languages but unskilled at translation, for most types of text, and for most popular languages (including languages that are known to be difficult, like Czech, Chinese and Arabic).'”

By 2024 LLM-based translation had clearly passed the 'fluent but untrained bilingual' bar: a November 2024 benchmarking study found GPT-4 matched junior-to-mid-level professional human translators across high-, medium- and low-resource directions, with commercial systems at or near parity for popular languages.

“Researchers predict AI will outperform humans in many activities in the next ten years, such as writing high-school essays (by 2026) — i.e. a 50% chance that machines will 'write an essay for a high school history class that would receive high grades and pass plagiarism detectors.'”

Achieved ahead of the deadline: a February 2023 scoring attempt judged ChatGPT history essays below average, but GPT-4-class models from 2023 onward routinely produce high-scoring high-school history essays that plagiarism detectors do not flag.