Astral Codex Ten

Ajeya Cotra

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Ajeya Cotra

Article

Ajeya Cotra is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 9 times across 9 issues between February 23, 2022 and February 12, 2026. The archive places it in contexts such as “In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report”; “using the same methodology as Ajeya: extrapolate how quickly processing power would grow”; “discourse around Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines”. It most often appears alongside Eliezer Yudkowsky, OpenAI, Yudkowsky.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 9
  • Issue count: 9
  • First seen: February 23, 2022
  • Last seen: February 12, 2026

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work
February 23, 2022 · Original source
The Open Philanthropy Project ("Open Phil") is a big effective altruist foundation interested in funding AI safety. It's got $20 billion, probably the majority of money in the field, so its decisions matter a lot and it’s very invested in getting things right. In 2020, it asked senior researcher Ajeya Cotra to produce a report on when human-level AI would arrive. It says the resulting document is "informal" - but it’s 169 pages long and likely to affect millions of dollars in funding, which some might describe as making it kind of formal. The report finds a 10% chance of “transformative AI” by 2031, a 50% chance by 2052, and an almost 80% chance by 2100.
Inline links: Open Philanthropy Project, https://drive.google.com/drive/u/1/folders/15ArhEPZSTYU8f012bs6ehPS6-xmhtBPP
Ajeya Cotra is a senior research analyst at OpenPhil. She's assisted by her fiancee Paul Christiano (compsci PhD, OpenAI veteran, runs an AI alignment nonprofit) and to a lesser degree by other leading lights. Although not everyone involved has formal ML training, if you care a lot about whether efforts are “establishment” or “contrarian”, this one is probably more establishment.
Does this encode too many questionable assumptions? For example, might AGI come from an ecosystem of interacting projects (eg how the Industrial Revolution came from an ecosystem of interacting technologies) such that nobody has to train an entire brain-sized AI in one run? Maybe - in fact, Ajeya thinks the Industrial Revolution scenario might be more likely than the single-run scenario. But she finds the single-run scenario as a useful upper bound (later she mentions other reasons to try it as a lower bound, and compromises by treating it as a central estimate) and still thinks it’s worth figuring out how long it will take.
What Are We Arguing About When We Argue About Rationality?
March 04, 2022 · Original source
Even this doesn’t go far enough - it suggests that intuition might only be useful under pressure, and when you have enough time you should do the math. But I recently reviewed the discourse around Ajeya Cotra’s report on AI timelines, and even though everyone involved is a math genius playing around with a super complex model, their arguments tended to sound like “It still just doesn’t feel like you’re accounting for the possibility of a paradigm shift enough” or “I feel like the fact that your model fails at X is more important than that my model fails at Y, because X seems more like the kind of problem we want to extrapolate this to.” The model itself is explicit, but every decision about how to make the model or how to use the model is intuitive and debated on intuitive grounds.
Inline links: report on AI timelines
Book Review: What We Owe The Future
August 23, 2022 · Original source
But Ajeya Cotra's Biological Anchors report estimates a 10% chance of transformative AI by 2031, and a 50% chance by 2052. Others (eg Eliezer Yudkowsky) think it might happen even sooner.
Inline links: Biological Anchors report, Eliezer Yudkowsky
Links For September 2022
September 06, 2022 · Original source
5: Related: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report. “I think my fundamental objection to the report is that it doesn’t seem aware of what argument it’s making, or even than it is making an argument.”
Inline links: Nostalgebraist on Ajeya Cotra’s biological anchors AI timelines report
Open Thread 270
April 03, 2023 · Original source
3: Lots of people are looking for trustworthy information about AI safety now. I highly recommend the new blog Planned Obsolescence by Kelsey Piper and Ajeya Cotra, They’re both AI safety veterans, have lots of contacts in industry and research, and are as close to the center of the graph of people thinking about these topics as you’re likely to find. They’re also great writers. Also, the audio version (read by an AI trained to mimic Kelsey’s voice) is very impressive.
Inline links: Planned Obsolescence
Davidson On Takeoff Speeds
June 20, 2023 · Original source
But a few months ago, Ajeya Cotra of Bio Anchors updated her estimate to 2040. Some of this update was because she read CCF and was convinced, but some was because of other considerations. Now CCF is later than (updated) Bio Anchors. Someone is wrong and needs to update, which might mean we should think of CCF as predicting earlier than 2043. I suggest discovering some new consideration which allows a revision to the mid-2030s, which would also match the current vibes.
Inline links: updated her estimate to 2040
Sakana, Strawberry, and Scary AI
September 18, 2024 · Original source
A Twitter discussion between Ajeya Cotra and Eliezer Yudkowsky:
Inline links: Twitter discussion
Links For February 2026
February 05, 2026 · Original source
58: Ajeya Cotra on the stable marriage problem viewed as a mathematization of the insight that it’s better to be the asker than the askee across a wide variety of domains, but especially dating - women could do better if they asked men out more. But Cyn explains why she disagrees:
Inline links: on the stable marriage problem, explains why she disagrees
…sparking further arguments and contributions from Wesley Fenza and Sympathetic Opposition.
Inline links: Wesley Fenza, Sympathetic Opposition
What Happened With Bio Anchors?
February 12, 2026 · Original source
Ajeya Cotra’s Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was prescient - it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like “time horizons” that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong.
Inline links: Biological Anchors
But its headline prediction - an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s - no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s, with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless - the opposite of Ajeya’s assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 (as of 2022) and they are probably even shorter now.
Inline links: current state, 2020s, 2040s, as of 2022
These questions have no right answer, but one conclusion does seem pretty firm. Most of the bad-faith critics, having identified that Ajeya’s model was imperfect and could fail, defaulted to the Safe Uncertainty Fallacy - since we can never be sure a model is exactly right, things are uncertain, which means we can continue to believe everything is fine and normal and timelines are wrong and we don’t have to worry. But as Yudkowsky pointed out, there’s uncertainty on both sides! Sometimes the fact that a forecast is imperfect and you can never be certain means things are more dangerous than you thought!
Inline links: Safe Uncertainty Fallacy