AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu (Mechanize, ex-Epoch AI) argue AGI is 30+ years out but explosive economic growth — economy doubling every 1-2 years — is still plausible before then.

• Erdil and Besiroglu put AGI arrival at 2045 or later, roughly 30 years out from now.
• Despite a long AGI timeline, they expect explosive economic growth: the economy literally doubling every 1-2 years.
• They reject the intelligence-explosion framing — a recursive self-improvement runaway is not considered plausible.
• The standard ‘alignment’ framing is, in their view, the wrong lens for thinking about AI risk or progress.
• Current reasoning models still lack capabilities present in animal intelligence, not just human-level cognition.
• Their startup Mechanize is explicitly targeting full automation of knowledge work, not augmentation.
• Timestamps suggest they debate whether a separate AI economy could emerge and whether central planning could become viable at scale.

2025-04-17 · Watch on YouTube