Takeoff and the intelligence explosion

Plain English. Scenario language for how fast AI capability compounds once AI meaningfully contributes to AI research: fast versus slow takeoff, with the "intelligence explosion" as the limit case where the loop runs away. These are positions in an argument, not observations — every claimed takeoff speed embeds assumptions about bottlenecks (compute, data, verification) that reasonable researchers dispute.

Why it moves money. Takeoff assumptions are the discount rate of the whole frontier. Under fast takeoff, today's leader compounds out of reach and any capex is justified — the winner-take-all arithmetic behind the largest valuations. Under slow takeoff, AI is an ordinary industrial buildout with competition, margin pressure and cycles. The same spreadsheet, under the two assumptions, differs by trillions.

What to watch. The measured doubling times, not the rhetoric. Anthropic's institute reports the length of software tasks models complete reliably doubling roughly every four months, up from about seven — a claim with a checkable trajectory. Whether that curve holds, bends or breaks is the takeoff debate settling in public.

From the signals. The Anthropic Institute published an RSI essay and an economic scenario model, explicit that full RSI has not arrived. OpenAI's chief scientist says no lab can responsibly keep scaling flat out. See also recursive self-improvement.

Further reading. METR, "Measuring AI ability to complete long tasks".