{"id":"318409d67eb2ca02d627281240891891f364a837a8d79ced9a4f5f411d375821","title":"Ajeya Cotra argues in Planned Obsolescence that selected AI task milestones are ahead of forecast","argument":"Ajeya Cotra’s post was published on August 14, 2026. She revisits ten qualitative forecasts for AI capabilities and assesses their status. Cotra says math is well ahead of her predictions, logistics and video are roughly on track, and game play and game design are somewhat ahead. Some judgments remain ambiguous: she says end-to-end birthday-party planning might require more setup and inference spending than people would want, while the research-paper forecast depends partly on whether AI agents can explain their work well enough to write a paper. Cotra says the selected task milestones seem to be arriving 30%-50% faster than she predicted, but says she would not mechanically raise her probabilities for more extreme milestones. 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The judgments, forecasts and the 'profoundly unprepared' line stay framed as her own statements.","excerpt":"Hurtling through 2026\nScoring ten qualitative forecasts five months early\nAjeya Cotra"},{"dimension":"summary","status":"uncertain","explanation":"The reading is broadly faithful but hard to follow without background. 'Intelligence explosion' is central to Cotra's conclusion, yet it is neither explained nor in the definitions. 'Inference spending' is also left unexplained. Readers also learn only category labels, not what the forecasts were: concrete tasks like beating Pokemon, IMO problem 6 or planning a wedding, set in January as 80%/20% low- and high-end bets. The summary also omits her view that the paper forecast feels beaten in spirit. Smallest repair: briefly gloss these terms, add one or two example tasks with the 80/20 framing, and note the beaten-in-spirit view.","excerpt":"That makes this prediction ambiguous,5 but given that I was mostly thinking about the math itself at the time, it feels like it’s been beaten in spirit."},{"dimension":"date","status":"pass","explanation":"The stated date, August 14, 2026, matches the dateline and the instant in evidence.originalPublished. modifiedAt is the same as the publication time. The page is a publisher page, not an archive copy. The year-end milestones are kept as unresolved forecasts, with no hindsight framing.","excerpt":"Ajeya Cotra\nAug 14, 2026"},{"dimension":"support","status":"pass","explanation":"Each claim matches its excerpt. This covers the category judgments, the 30%-50% pace, her refusal to mechanically update, the intelligence-explosion line, the pacing line and the ambiguity of the paper forecast. Calling 'we' society is a mild gloss. 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