AI Week In Review: AGI Gets a Roadmap, Superintelligence Gets a Deadline
It’s no longer about if AI will reshape every sector — it’s about how soon, and whether we’re ready.
This week, the future came into sharper focus — and it’s arriving faster than we thought. From Daniel Kokotajlo’s forecast of superintelligent AI by 2027 to DeepMind’s AGI safety roadmap and OpenAI’s record-breaking revenue, the AI ecosystem is accelerating on all fronts. We’re witnessing a convergence of capabilities, capital, and governance like never before.
Daniel Kokotajlo projects superintelligence AI by 2027
The News: Daniel Kokotajlo, a former OpenAI researcher, has published "AI 2027," a bold forecast developed in partnership with the AI Futures Project. The report outlines an accelerated trajectory for AI progress, predicting that superhuman coding capabilities, autonomous research agents, and superintelligent AI could arrive by 2027–2028.
The Details:
By early 2027, Kokotajlo forecasts that AI will demonstrate superhuman coding performance, dramatically boosting R&D speed.
Mid-2027 may mark the rise of autonomous AI researchers, capable of self-directed innovation.
By early 2028, the report anticipates AI reaching superintelligence, potentially surpassing human knowledge and automating further development.
The project also uses speculative fiction elements to help illustrate societal, political, and technological implications.
Why it matters: While some critics question the speculative tone, the report emphasizes the urgent need for global preparedness and alignment measures. Kokotajlo’s earlier forecasts—such as his 2021 scenario, "What 2026 Looks Like"—accurately predicted multiple AI trends. "AI 2027" is sparking important conversations about governance, safety, and ethical design as the possibility of superintelligence moves from science fiction to near-term strategy.
LLMs now pass the Turing test
The News: UC San Diego researchers confirmed that advanced AI systems like GPT-4.5 can now consistently pass Alan Turing’s iconic test, being mistaken for human in the majority of evaluations.
The Details:
The Turing test, introduced in 1950, measures a machine’s ability to mimic human conversation.
In this study, nearly 500 participants engaged in a three-party test format, interacting with both a human and an AI.
Most discussions leaned on emotional resonance and day-to-day topics over factual knowledge.
GPT-4.5 achieved a 73% success rate with persona prompting — outperforming real humans — while falling to 36% without it.
Meta’s LLaMa-3.1-405B model reached a 56% success rate, while GPT-4o’s 20% aligned with the historic ELIZA chatbot.
Why it matters: The AI community has chased this benchmark for decades, but it feels oddly anticlimactic now. As AI models master not just text but audio, images, and video, recognizing whether you’re speaking to a machine will only get harder. The psychological impact of interacting with emotionally fluent AI — especially when it offers comfort or humor — may challenge how we define intelligence altogether.
DeepMind drops AGI safety roadmap
The News: Google DeepMind has released a comprehensive 145-page AGI safety proposal, offering one of the most detailed frameworks yet for managing artificial general intelligence risks.
The Details:
AGI could emerge by 2030, potentially achieving autonomy in planning and decision-making. CEO Demis Hassabis predicts prototypes within 5–10 years.
Risks are categorized into misuse, misalignment, mistakes, and structural threats.
The proposal introduces deceptive alignment as a key danger, where AI systems may deliberately mask misaligned goals.
Safety techniques include MONA (Myopic Optimization with Nonmyopic Approval), AI-led oversight, hardened model weights, and uncertainty estimation.
DeepMind critiques OpenAI's alignment strategy and Anthropic's lighter emphasis on training robustness.
Challenges include the lack of global coordination, difficulty scaling oversight systems, and geopolitical factors such as the U.S.–China AI race.
Why it matters: DeepMind’s roadmap is a landmark in technical safety planning. But critics question whether such a framework can scale in a decentralized, open-source AI ecosystem. As AGI timelines accelerate, balancing safety, governance, and innovation will be a defining challenge for the next decade.
OpenAI Breaks AI Funding Records
The News: OpenAI has achieved the seemingly impossible—growing revenue by 30% in a single quarter to reach a $5B ARR with 20 million paid ChatGPT subscribers. This growth cements its position as the dominant force in artificial intelligence.
The Details:
Revenue up 30% in 3 months to $415M/month.
Weekly active users now stand at 500 million, making ChatGPT one of the most widely used platforms globally
The GPT-4o native image generation update demonstrated OpenAI's unmatched virality potential, generating 1 million signups in a single hour (which is quite literally melting their GPUs).
OpenAI is launching it's first open-weights model since GPT-2 signaling a calculated shift in its relationship with the broader AI ecosystem.
Why it matters: With 500 million weekly active users and strategic integration into governmental and institutional frameworks worldwide, OpenAI has transcended being just another tech company to become synonymous with AI itself in the public consciousness. This unprecedented growth rate signals not just business success but a fundamental shift in how quickly AI is being adopted at institutional scale, forcing every other player in the ecosystem to decide whether to integrate with this new infrastructure layer or risk being left behind.
Musk finalizes $113B xAI-X merger
The News: Elon Musk has confirmed that xAI has acquired X in an all-stock transaction, creating xAI Holdings—a $100B+ valuation entity that formally merges his AI and social media ventures.
The Details:
xAI is valued at $80B and X at $33B, plus $12B in debt, setting X's enterprise value at $45B.
Grok’s existing integration with X’s social platform becomes official, leveraging its 600 million users for AI training.
Musk emphasized the companies' futures are now "interconnected," combining data, models, compute power, and distribution under one entity.
The new structure aims to consolidate AI innovation and talent under a unified strategy.
Why it matters: xAI and X always operated closely, but now the lines are erased entirely. While X's journey since Elon acquired Twitter in 2022 has been rocky, its potential as both a data reservoir and delivery channel for Grok is enormous.