logoalt Hacker News

frognumbertoday at 3:47 AM2 repliesview on HN

This was their prediction for 2026:

"The bet of using AI to speed up AI research is starting to pay off.

OpenBrain continues to deploy the iteratively improving Agent-1 internally for AI R&D. Overall, they are making algorithmic progress 50% faster than they would without AI assistants—and more importantly, faster than their competitors. The AI R&D progress multiplier: what do we mean by 50% faster algorithmic progress?

Several competing publicly released AIs now match or exceed Agent-0, including an open-weights model. OpenBrain responds by releasing Agent-1, which is more capable and reliable.28

People naturally try to compare Agent-1 to humans, but it has a very different skill profile. It knows more facts than any human, knows practically every programming language, and can solve well-specified coding problems extremely quickly. On the other hand, Agent-1 is bad at even simple long-horizon tasks, like beating video games it hasn’t played before. Still, the common workday is eight hours, and a day’s work can usually be separated into smaller chunks; you could think of Agent-1 as a scatterbrained employee who thrives under careful management.29 Savvy people find ways to automate routine parts of their jobs.30

OpenBrain’s executives turn consideration to an implication of automating AI R&D: security has become more important. In early 2025, the worst-case scenario was leaked algorithmic secrets; now, if China steals Agent-1’s weights, they could increase their research speed by nearly 50%.31 OpenBrain’s security level is typical of a fast-growing ~3,000 person tech company, secure only against low-priority attacks from capable cyber groups (RAND’s SL2).32 They are working hard to protect their weights and secrets from insider threats and top cybercrime syndicates (SL3),33 but defense against nation states (SL4&5) is barely on the horizon."

https://ai-2027.com/

That's precisely where we are.

This is eerie. It's like a time traveler. The only delta is Anthropic is in the role of OpenAI.


Replies

gensymtoday at 6:05 AM

So you think Anthropic is using internal AI assistants to pull away from competitors and the leapfrogging we've seen over the last several years is now done?

That seems to me to be the most concrete and least obvious prediction in the quoted text.

I don't think that's happening. If that were generally accepted as true I would expect OpenAI to be unable to successfully IPO.

show 2 replies
reducesufferingtoday at 7:47 AM

That's because one of the author's of AI 2027, Daniel Kokotajlo, an ex-OpenAI researcher, was the most prescient predictor of our modern situation from 2021:

https://asteriskmag.substack.com/p/before-he-wrote-ai-2027-h...

https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6Xgy6CAf2jqHhynHL/what-2026-...

Anyone who wants to dismiss the LessWrong / X-Risk / "doomers" should link their accurate predictions from 2021.

show 1 reply