Probability of AI's Impact by 2040

The majority of respondents who reference their LEAP Wave 1 forecasts on this question shift toward higher TRS outcomes, typically citing faster-than-expected AI capabilities progress: “Since Wave 1, I've updated upward. The evidence keeps coming in faster than the models predicted --> FrontierMath blew past expert forecasts, METR's task horizon is already at 90 minutes and climbing on a log curve that doesn't look like it's slowing down. That's why I've moved my modal from Level 7 to Level 9.”; “Given that my previous forecasts under-predicted the rate of progress on the questions that have resolved so far, moving some mass from my previous answer to this question onto level 10.”; “We're already at 7/8 and 2040 is a long time away.” A smaller group does not adjust their forecast relative to Wave 1, often emphasizing that that 2040 is likely too soon for the highest levels; a few even shift their probability mass downward: “My thinking [has] only changed marginally since August 2025 when I answered the same question. Once again, the key point is that not much in human societies changes fundamentally over ~15 years.”; “The 2040 horizon is a key constraint: even ASI arriving in the late 2030s leaves little runway for epoch-defining impact to materialize and be recognizable.”

Relatedly, low-TRS respondents often distinguish between the pace of AI capabilities progress and AI diffusion: “People, institutions, cultures, simply don't change that quickly.” One writes, “Electricity took + 50 years from [the establishment of the first commercial power plant at] Pearl Street to full societal impact.” Another emphasizes that reaching higher levels requires the co-evolution of “societal readiness, human cognitive and cultural adaptation, regulatory and political alignment, and economic integration.” High-TRS respondents tend to argue that technical capabilities are scaling so rapidly that they will overcome these traditional roadblocks: “FrontierMath hit 50% by March 2026, HLE gained 30 points in a year, METR task horizons reached 1.5 hours…This warrants shifting 10pp from L8 into L9 (+7pp) and L10 (+3pp).”; “If the next 14 [years] see autonomous research agents, AI-accelerated scientific discovery, and widespread cognitive automation, ‘technology of the millennium’ isn’t too far of a stretch.”

Several high-TRS respondents point to the arrival of AGI or ASI as a likely tipping point: “I have roughly 65% on ASI by 2040 [and] conditional on ASI, Level 10 seems quite likely.”; “I expect AGI by around 2030 and an intelligence explosion likely within around a year of that.” The ability, in an AGI scenario, for AI to automate its own research and development was also cited: “Recursive self-improvement has moved from theory to practice… If this holds, AI becomes an autonomous engine of scientific discovery by the early 2030s, restructuring how knowledge is produced.” Low-TRS respondents tend to express more uncertainty regarding AGI, with one writing that “while I don't think it is impossible before 2040, I think it is very unlikely.” Others emphasize the potential for an “AI winter in the next few years,” to result in a capabilities plateau or for AI investment to contract if “the AI boom is actually a bubble that pop[s] in the next few years.”

High-TRS respondents typically view AI as a meta-technology whose impact will be partly measured by the degree to which it accelerates other technologies: “Given the general-purpose technology (GPT) characteristics of AI, it is most likely to be a ‘technology of the century,’ comparable to past disruptive technologies such as electricity and the automobile.” Low-TRS respondents, however, point to this same quality as having the potential to result in a lower TRS score: “Other technologies seem more likely to be ‘of the millennium,’ such as space travel, quantum, [and] nuclear energy advances.”

While less frequently the primary driver of the forecasts, some high-TRS respondents assign a non-trivial probability to an AI-driven extinction event or a global takeover by AI: “The conceptual arguments are pretty strong that AI will be Level 10, e.g., the AIs will get really smart, kill all humans, and do what they want with the reachable universe.” Low-TRS respondents generally dismiss these outcomes for the 2040 timeframe: “[Level 10] either assumes that a) ‘AGI’ will emerge as a new ‘species’ to take over the world (which is just fantasy), or b) that a massive degree of somewhat voluntary societal change will take place to accommodate whatever ‘AI’ is in 2040, which does not make sense sociologically...”