Home Speakers Sonya Huang Quote Last year, we anticipated it would be nearly a decade before we had intern-level code generation, Hollywood-quality videos or human quality speech that didn’t sound mechanical. But a quick listen to Eleven Labs’ voices on TikTok or Runway’s AI film festival makes it clear that the future has arrived at warp speed.
Words found on the source page on Nov 6, 2026.
More from Sonya Huang Essay 2026: This is AGI Jan 14, 2026
An AI that can figure things out has some baseline knowledge (pre-training), the ability to reason over that knowledge (inference-time compute), and the ability to iterate its way to the answer (long-horizon agents). Essay 2026: This is AGI Jan 14, 2026
If there’s one exponential curve to bet on, it’s the performance of long-horizon agents. METR has been meticulously tracking AI’s ability to complete long-horizon tasks. The rate of progress is exponential, doubling every ~7 months. Essay 2026: This is AGI Jan 14, 2026
Today, your agents can probably work reliably for ~30 minutes. But they’ll be able to perform a day’s worth of work very soon – and a century’s worth of work eventually. Essay Generative AI's Act Two Sep 20, 2023
In generative AI, we have reached a modern marvel, our generation’s space race.
On the same topics Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
An AI with more real layers can actually be “smarter” in the conventional sense of the term. Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
For 100 steps in a row, the AI can shoot delicate subtle ideas from layer to layer at the speed of light. Then there’s one step where it has to encode them into twenty-six glyphs invented by Phoenician turquoise miners in 1800 BC. Then it has to re-encode the Phoenician glyphs into delicate subtle lightspeed ideas before it can do anything else. Blog The Specter Of Neuralese Sep 24, 2026
The science of reading these thoughts is a subfield of AI interpretability, which is still in its infancy. Blog Mysteries Of AI Generalization Sep 23, 2026
This trains the AIs to be focused on task success, which naturally risks including things like reward-hacking, cheating, and single-minded pursuit of stated goals at the expense of ethical injunctions. Blog Why I still haven't bought into true RSI Sep 19, 2026
It is important to not confuse massive steps in inference-time scaling, a dynamic which should be fairly predictable, with being the outputs of RSI, which is highly uncertain. Podcast Dwarkesh Podcast: Agent swarms, alignment, and recursive self-improvement Sep 17, 2026
If you have five hours, you’re probably going to do a lot better. The AI models are pretty similar. About this quote