Anticipating Our AGI Future

About the course

There is a lot of excitement and concerns around the rate of progress in AI systems.

We will start with technical content on how frontier models are trained and evaluated. From there the class will be largely discussion and participation-based, with a final project. We hope to have multiple guest speakers from frontier labs throughout the semester.

Questions we will potentially explore together:

• What are scaling laws, and why are we building so many datacenters?
• How much of the world is using AI, and how much has not used AI?
• How fast will AI systems improve? What are the bottlenecks?
• What does the future of work look like? Will human labor be optional?
• What is RSI, and what does it mean for AI progress?

Instructor

Audience and prerequisites

Audience

We invite students from all departments to join our discussions!

Prerequisites

While there is no hard technical prerequisite, familiarity with machine learning concepts (e.g., understanding how transformers work) is highly useful. We expect students to be able to pick up necessary technical concepts as needed.

Guest speakers

We aim to host several guest speakers from frontier labs and other AI organizations. Confirmed speakers will be listed here as they are scheduled.

Final project

TBD.

Readings

If any of the following looks interesting, this is the right class for you.

1. Oct 2017Artificial Intelligence and Economic Growth — Aghion, Jones & Jones
2. Mar 2022Training Compute-Optimal Large Language Models (Chinchilla) — Hoffmann et al.
3. Mar 2023GPTs are GPTs: An Early Look at the Labor Market Impact Potential of LLMs — Eloundou et al.
4. Sep 2023Explosive Growth from AI Automation: A Review of the Arguments — Erdil & Besiroglu
5. Nov 2023The A.I. Dilemma: Growth versus Existential Risk — Jones
6. Mar 2025GATE: Modeling the Trajectory of AI and Automation — Epoch AI
7. Mar 2025Measuring AI Ability to Complete Long Tasks — Kwa et al. (METR)
8. Apr 2025AI 2027 — Kokotajlo et al.
9. Apr 2025AI as Normal Technology — Narayanan & Kapoor
10. Jul 2025Measuring the Impact of Early-2025 AI on Experienced Open-Source Developer Productivity — Becker et al. (METR)
11. Aug 2025Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of AI — Brynjolfsson, Chandar & Chen
12. Aug 2025Transformative AI, Existential Risk, and Real Interest Rates — Chow, Halperin & Mazlish
13. Sep 2025How People Use ChatGPT — Chatterji et al.
14. Sep 2025What Will AI Look Like in 2030? — Epoch AI
15. Dec 2025Capital in the 22nd Century — Trammell & Patel
16. Jan 2026State of AI: An Empirical 100 Trillion Token Study with OpenRouter — Aubakirova et al.
17. Apr 2026When Does Automating AI Research Produce Explosive Growth? — Davidson et al.
18. May 2026Is Labor a Luxury in the Long Run? — Trammell
19. May 2026The Politics of Jobless Prosperity — Hall
20. Jul 2026AI 2040: Plan A — Larsen et al.
21. Jul 2026The Economics of Recursive Self-Improvement — Cunningham & Althoff (Elasticity Institute)
22. Aug 2026The Hugging Face incident and the road ahead — OpenAI
23. Aug 2026Understanding AI and Productivity — Chad Syverson