Concept record · edition 1.0.0
AI forecasting
What the term means here
Projection of future capability from historical measurements, expert elicitation, or trend extrapolation.
Why it matters
Forecasts drive policy and capital allocation, and their failure modes are documentable rather than hypothetical.
What this does not establish
That any projection in this map is a prediction. Forecast-status claims are conditional scenarios with stated assumptions and failure modes.
Related claim records · 2
- si-018
METR defines a 50%-task-completion time horizon: the time humans typically take on tasks a model completes with 50% success. Its published measurement reports a horizon of around 50 minutes for one frontier model of that period, and a doubling of the horizon roughly every seven months since 2019, with a possible acceleration in 2024.
- si-021
Aggregated expert forecasts of AI capability timelines have shifted substantially between survey rounds.
Sources used here · 3
Thousands of AI Authors on the Future of AI
Grace et al. · 2024
The large expert-survey instrument used for timeline forecasting, and evidence about forecast instability.
Source record →Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Software Tasks
Kwa et al. (METR) · 2025
The primary definition of the 50%-task-completion time horizon. Abstract read during this pass; it is the only verified source for any time-horizon figure in this map.
Source record →Beyond the Imitation Game: Quantifying and extrapolating the capabilities of language models
Srivastava et al. · 2022
A large collaborative benchmark explicitly concerned with extrapolating capability.
Source record →