Expert Survey on Progress in AI
Julius Simonelli, Tim Duffy
Mentored by Katja Grace
Working report from the SPAR program. May not reflect the authors' current views.
Abstract
The Expert Survey on Progress in AI (ESPAI) has been conducted four times since 2016, polling AI researchers on when they expect key milestones, such as High-Level Machine Intelligence (HLMI) and Full Automation of Labor (FAOL), to be achieved. It also asks how they assess the risks and benefits of advanced AI, including the probability of human extinction or similarly permanent and severe disempowerment. In this final report we present three complementary analyses of the ESPAI data. First, we compare the 2024 survey responses across geographic regions (United States, China, and Europe), finding broadly similar views with modest but informative differences. Second, we track how expert predictions have shifted across the 2016, 2022, 2023, and 2024 waves, documenting a dramatic acceleration in aggregate HLMI timelines and an overall increase in safety concern. Third, we apply clustering methods to the 2024 cleaned responses to describe broad regions of a continuous belief landscape, including a notable “polarized/bimodal” group that assigns high probability to both extremely good and extremely bad outcomes.