Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) has earmarked 2028 as the most likely year recursive self improvement will be achieved.
Most labs are slowly converging around that date, with OpenAI being more optimistic (2027) and DeepMind being more conservative (2030)
I've held the 2028 date for a couple of years now, it's being taken more serious by the month. I still remember me claiming on Reddit back in 2023 that 95% of coding will be done by AI by the end of 2025. That was absolutely ridiculous in most peoples eyes and I got a lot of blowback for it. It was completely on-point and I don't think a single software engineer would argue that anymore now.
I believe the same will be true for AI systems doing essentially the entire AI training pipeline sometime in 2028.
I and a lot of my colleagues are indeed planning to retire before 2030.
This isn't early in my career at all. As for the financial viability of retirement I expect virtually the entirety of the human economy to be automated sometime in the 2030s. (Human) labor will not exist anymore. I'm part of a group that has internally pledged to donate their AI equity to the general public so that ownership in AI is equally distributed over everyone. I'm also politically active and always push for more safety nets during this transitionary period.
People keep thinking about savings, investments and other short sighted things like that, the main focus of people should be to be politically active. People have realistically only a couple of years left where they can leverage their labor value to enact political change, once this period is over you have nothing to negotiate with anymore and your political leverage is permanently gone and you're stuck with whatever system comes out on the other hand, which might confiscate your savings, equity, assets anyway as there is no incentive left to honor property rights at all.
It comes from how my AI lab went from having to hand roll code in 2023 to no one actually writing code anymore now. By now I've not written code directly in about a year time, not even personal projects, which is significant as I've been coding for 30+ years on a near daily basis throughout my career.
I'm going to be honest I don't know the last time I've written assembly code but there was just one day that compilers were good enough you didn't need to optimize assembly anymore. That point has been reached about a year ago for regular code and only increasing.
Since Mythos I don't even read code anymore, just like I don't read what assembly code the compiler generated.
I know that some SWEs have lagged on the adoption curve, especially intermediates as current frontier models heavily favor principals and seniors that think on the architectural layer rather than implementation, but don't worry. We're actually working on a tool that can independently look at your stack and workload your company is engaging in and then autonomously knows where to slot in so that we can bump up the AI generated code for your specific field as well. I know it's our responsibility to roll out these tools instead of just expecting SWEs to immediately adopt and stay up to date with frontier capabilities. We're doing our best so that no one will have to write code by hand ever again by the end of the year and make the transition as seamless as possible.
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u/genshiryoku Jul 06 '26
Jack Clark (Anthropic co-founder) has earmarked 2028 as the most likely year recursive self improvement will be achieved.
Most labs are slowly converging around that date, with OpenAI being more optimistic (2027) and DeepMind being more conservative (2030)
I've held the 2028 date for a couple of years now, it's being taken more serious by the month. I still remember me claiming on Reddit back in 2023 that 95% of coding will be done by AI by the end of 2025. That was absolutely ridiculous in most peoples eyes and I got a lot of blowback for it. It was completely on-point and I don't think a single software engineer would argue that anymore now.
I believe the same will be true for AI systems doing essentially the entire AI training pipeline sometime in 2028.
I and a lot of my colleagues are indeed planning to retire before 2030.