Samuel Hammond 🦉(@hamandcheese):My prediction for RSI is a secret 3rd thing. Within about 9 months, capabilities will seem to discontinously leap to crazy high levels in most domains thanks to automated R&D, but fall short of a full Yudkowskyan "foom." People will declare that ASI is here. Progress in math, science, medicine, digital services, etc. will be unprecedently fast. Diffusion will partially solve itself through capabilities, although many barriers will remain. Incumbent industries will start turning over and the economy will be ripping. There will be growing waves of institutional disruption, cyberattacks, lots of crazy shit happening etc., but it will be basically tolerable. Overall, it will feel like a new Renaissance has begun. GPT will even compose a fugue that brings Dean Ball to tears. After the RSI leap, capability improvements will be more linear than super-exponential given compute and data constraints. We'll be matmul-ing at the theorerical optimal. There will be many freaky alignment failures but alignment science will itself be automated, putting the worst doomer fears to rest. This quasi-plateau will last on the order of months to a few years, giving the techno-optimists ample time to spike the football. But it will be a kind of false vacuum. At some point not long after RSI 1.0, a breakthrough of some kind (perhaps hardware related) will raise the theoretical capability ceiling by multiple OOMs, at which point we foom for real.

2026.10.07 01:00

My prediction for RSI is a secret 3rd thing. Within about 9 months, capabilities will seem to discontinously leap to crazy high levels in most domains thanks to automated R&D, but fall short of a full Yudkowskyan "foom." People will declare that ASI is here. Progress in math, science, medicine, digital services, etc. will be unprecedently fast. Diffusion will partially solve itself through capabilities, although many barriers will remain. Incumbent industries will start turning over and the economy will be ripping. There will be growing waves of institutional disruption, cyberattacks, lots of crazy shit happening etc., but it will be basically tolerable. Overall, it will feel like a new Renaissance has begun. GPT will even compose a fugue that brings Dean Ball to tears. After the RSI leap, capability improvements will be more linear than super-exponential given compute and data constraints. We'll be matmul-ing at the theorerical optimal. There will be many freaky alignment failures but alignment science will itself be automated, putting the worst doomer fears to rest. This quasi-plateau will last on the order of months to a few years, giving the techno-optimists ample time to spike the football. But it will be a kind of false vacuum. At some point not long after RSI 1.0, a breakthrough of some kind (perhaps hardware related) will raise the theoretical capability ceiling by multiple OOMs, at which point we foom for real.

MTS@MTSlive

2026.10.06 22:42

Forethought's @TomDavidsonX on the overlooked RSI scenario where AI never "fooms" but progress still accelerates 2–3x: "When people say RSI, they're lazily assuming that it is gonna foom. Which is totally plausible." "I distinguish the foom and the fizzle scenario. In the fizzle scenario you have that recursive loop, but because the ideas are getting so much harder to find, the RSI isn't too scary. To be honest, I still think it's pretty scary in that scenario. We're talking about 2X, 3X the pace of progress." "Actually RSI is just scary, fizzle or foom." "A lot of people at the frontier labs are really thinking it's the foom, so they're like, 'RSI, foom, it's all the same thing, and it's coming next year.'" @forethought_org