Experts and Superforecasters Update Their AI Timelines

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Experts and Superforecasters Update Their AI Timelines<br>In Wave 8 of the Longitudinal Expert AI Panel we asked panelists to forecast AI's overall impact on human society, AGI timelines, near-term progress on METR's time horizon benchmark, and more.

Forecasting Research Institute<br>Jun 02, 2026

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In the latest wave of the Longitudinal Expert AI Panel (LEAP), we asked AI experts, superforecasters, and members of the general public to consider the long-term capabilities and impact of AI. For the first time, we gathered updates on a question we asked in the very first LEAP wave back in the summer of 2025—asking panelists to forecast AI’s impact on human society by 2040.<br>We asked panelists for their predictions on AGI timelines,1 near-term progress on METR’s task-completion time horizon benchmark, the factors that will enable or block AGI by 2040, and timelines for a “rapid AI progress” scenario. We also asked panelists to assess AI’s overall impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years and its effects on people’s ability to solve problems, make difficult decisions, form meaningful relationships, and think creatively.<br>Every month, LEAP tracks the views of top AI scientists, industry leaders, policy researchers, economists, and high-performing forecasters on the trajectory of AI’s development and use. Recent waves covered robotics, the economic effects of AI, security and geopolitics, and AI R&D. You can see a full list of LEAP questions and forecasts here.<br>This post covers key highlights from the Wave 8 LEAP survey that we conducted between April 20 and May 11, 2026. More information about this wave, including question details and analysis of rationales, is available here.<br>Insight 1: Experts and superforecasters have updated their expectations of AI’s impact upward in the last nine months

Back in June/August 2025, we asked LEAP panelists to assess the likelihood of AI in 2040 reaching various levels of impact on the Technological Richter Scale (TRS)—a scale devised by Nate Silver to rank technologies according to their broad societal impact. Credit cards, for example, are ranked as a “technology of the decade” (Level 7) while the rise of humans ranks as a “technology of the epoch” (Level 10). You can view the forecasts from the first time we asked the question here.<br>We repeated this question in the current April/May 2026 wave, nine months after we first asked for forecasts. Experts and superforecasters have increased the likelihood they assign to AI’s impact being comparable to higher levels of technological importance, more akin to a “technology of the millennium” (e.g. agriculture, Level 9), but experts continue to assign the greatest probability to AI being comparable to “the technology of the century” (e.g. electricity, Level 8).<br>On average, experts assign a 35% chance of AI reaching TRS Level 8 by 2040, with substantial weight on Level 9 (24%) and Level 10 (11%). Superforecasters gave a near-identical distribution (34% to Level 8, 23% to Level 9, 8.5% to Level 10), while the public is meaningfully more conservative.<br>Among the 264 expert and superforecaster participants who completed both Wave 1 and Wave 8, the mean expected TRS levels rose for experts by +0.20 (from 7.86 to 8.06), with larger movement among superforecasters (+0.39, from 7.50 to 7.89) and minimal movement among the public (+0.07, from 7.18 to 7.25). 74% of participants remained within ±1 point of their Wave 1 forecast, while 15% increased and 11% decreased by more than one point.

Figure 1: Wave 1 vs Wave 8 TRS forecasts, matched participants only. The figure shows the mean probability assigned to each TRS level in Wave 1 and Wave 8, restricted to participants who completed both waves.<br>This shift is also visible in participants’ modal forecasts—the level each person assigns the highest probability to. Among matched experts, the share whose modal forecast is “technology of the century” grew from 38% to 53%. Superforecasters showed a more pronounced change: “technology of the decade” was the most common modal choice in Wave 1 (38% of superforecasters), but this was replaced by “the technology of the century” in Wave 8 (43%).<br>Insight 2: Most experts expect “AGI” before 2100, with a median forecast that it will occur by 2050

We asked respondents for the probability that, before 2100, more than 50% of LEAP panelists will agree that artificial general intelligence (AGI) exists and—if such a scenario occurs—the year in which they expect this to happen. We defined AGI as a commercially available AI system that meets both of the following criteria:<br>Can outperform the 90th percentile professional human employee in every primarily non-physical occupation (based on 2025 performance), across all sectors, on at least 90% of the economically useful non-physical tasks that they perform.

Has an inference cost no more than 5x the cost of equivalent human labor.

The median...