# Rapid self-improvement timelines outrun the evidence

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/rapid-self-improvement-timelines-outrun-the-evidence/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Richard Ngo](https://realalpha.app/people/richard-ngo/) · Richard Ngo is an independent AI researcher; former OpenAI governance and DeepMind safety researcher. · Researches multi-agent intelligence after working on AI alignment at DeepMind and governance at OpenAI.
- Host: [Theo Jaffee](https://realalpha.app/people/theo-jaffee/) · Co-founder & host, MTS · One of the first members of a16z's new media team; earlier hosted the Emergent Ventures-backed Theo Jaffee Podcast.
- Host: [Sophia Dew](https://realalpha.app/people/sophia-dew/) · Host, MTS
- Show: MTS
- Episode: [AI Cannot Reliably Run a Company for Six Months | Richard Ngo](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/), Nov 4, 2026
- Moment: 5:00 to 9:58 of the episode (5 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/rapid-self-improvement-timelines-outrun-the-evidence/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=300

## Quote

> “people are jumping **further than the evidence warrants** towards, you know, strongly expecting a very fast RSI of next couple of years.”
> — [Richard Ngo](https://realalpha.app/people/richard-ngo/) at [8:00](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=480) · MTS

## Takeaways

1. Automating parts of AI research does not show all of it will soon be automated.
2. He expects major disruption without a sudden intelligence explosion.
3. Past forecasting errors make slower trajectories hard for some to picture.

## About this segment

Richard Ngo argues that forecasts jump from partial AI R&D automation to rapid self-improvement without enough evidence. He expects a strange, disruptive decade, but not a sudden jump straight to superintelligence.

From “AI Cannot Reliably Run a Company for Six Months | Richard Ngo”, Nov 4, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[5:04](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=304) Not a huge amount. My sense is that there are a bunch of people who are reasonably thoughtful and open-minded, but tend to be in a pretty scared and panicky mindset because of the rate of AI progress. And so it's very difficult because, you know, almost everyone throughout the last, over the last decade or two has underestimated the rate of AI progress. And really a lot of the, you know, a lot of the forecasts, a lot of the capabilities we see right now are pretty sci-fi compared with what people expected five or ten years ago and so it does feel very hard to rule out the possibility that people are still dramatically underestimating the rate of progress at the same time i i sort of get a sense that a lot of people can only consider that possibility or they sort of they don't have a picture of a world in which uh things go more

[6:08](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=368) slowly and um you you get you know the something like the standard situation the current situation uh moving forward for the next decade or two decades with the ai companies becoming increasingly powerful and ai becoming increasingly pervasive but without some you know hitting the wall of recursive self-improvement so that's a lot of the scenario that i'm trying to think about like what if you know in a decade or two decades um ai is by far the biggest thing in the world but But at the same time, there hasn't been a single point where the lines went vertical, basically.

[6:43](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=403) Right. Yeah, I mean, I've also been thinking about this a lot. It seems to me that there's a remarkable amount of jumping to conclusions around short timelines and around very high PDU. That seems to me to be unjustified. It seems like people are taking the idea that AI labs are increasingly applying models to automating parts of AI R&D to mean that in very short order, the entirety of AI R&D will be fully automated.

[7:13](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=433) It seems like they're taking that to mean that there will be a rapid self-sustaining intelligence explosion with a high degree of certainty. it seems like they are taking all this to mean that with you know pretty high confidence ai timelines to you know for real for real super intelligence as opposed to merely more powerful versions of the jagged and imperfect ais that we have today are very very short and like it it just seems to me that with the data that we have about recursive self-improvement and how this carries over to intelligence explosion dynamics, like this is just not justified under the evidence.

[8:00](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=480) I think so. So there's I agree that people are jumping further than the evidence warrants towards, you know, strongly expecting a very fast RSI of next couple of years. um i do have a sense that uh it's easy to polarize on this issue and say well you know like some people are saying that um there's going to be um a foom happening pretty soon um they're unjustified therefore you know things are going to be much more normal than they expect i i don't really see the world looking normal over the next decade or so um and and so the the default sense i i have for what's going to happen is that uh we're not going to get uh like yeah things going vertical if you will we're not going to get like sudden and extreme um self-improvement that goes far beyond uh that goes very quickly far beyond into the super intelligent regime but at the same time

[9:05](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=545) things are going to go much uh things are going to look much weirder than almost anyone expects uh and yeah the exact shape of what it looks like for the world to be very weird is up for grabs and i think nobody's done an amazing job at describing that but right there's some i almost want to say that there's some point at which the anthropic and other folks who expect uh very rapid improvement are going to be directionally correct and sort of like uh maybe you could say morally correct if you will like to to expect that um things are going to get really crazy It's just that there's a lot of room for things to get crazy, as there already has been a lot of room.

[9:46](https://realalpha.app/v/YJjXjKJhUnI/?t=586) The AI situation is very weird and strange compared with what anyone expected, compared with what most people expected a decade or two ago. Yeah.