AGI emerges gradually through incremental improvements to existing architectures. Humans and AI develop symbiotic relationships — AI augments human intelligence rather than replacing it. Economic productivity soars but the transition is managed through universal basic income and retraining programs.
Once AI reaches the capability to improve its own code, an intelligence explosion occurs within months. The first mover gains decisive strategic advantage. Alignment becomes the single most important technical challenge in human history.
Major governments and corporations coordinate to slow AGI development, implementing a global moratorium on training runs above a certain compute threshold. AGI arrives in 2035 instead of 2028, buying time for alignment research.
"The difference between AGI in 2028 and AGI in 2035 is the difference between a species with a plan and a species caught by surprise."
Multiple AGIs emerge simultaneously from different labs with different architectures, goals, and value systems. The result is neither utopia nor dystopia but a complex ecology of competing superintelligences.
We discover fundamental limits to scaling laws. Each order of magnitude in compute yields diminishing returns. True AGI requires breakthroughs in architecture, not just scale, and those breakthroughs prove harder than expected.