What Happened With Bio Anchors?

[Original post: Biological Anchors: A Trick That Might Or Might Not Work ] I. Ajeya Cotra's Biological Anchors report was the landmark AI timelines forecast of the early 2020s. In many ways, it was incredibly prescient - it nailed the scaling hypothesis, predicted the current AI boom, and introduced concepts like "time horizons" that have entered common parlance. In most cases where its contemporaries challenged it, its assumptions have been borne out, and its challengers proven wrong. But its headline prediction - an AGI timeline centered around the 2050s - no longer seems plausible. The current state of the discussion ranges from late 2020s to 2040s , with more remote dates relegated to those who expect the current paradigm to prove ultimately fruitless - the opposite of Ajeya's assumptions. Cotra later shortened her own timelines to 2040 ( as of 2022 ) and they are probably even shorter now. So, if its premises were impressively correct, but its conclusion twenty years too late, what went wrong in the middle?

You can listen to What Happened With Bio Anchors? online on Radio and Podcast. Open the player on this page to stream the available audio.

What Happened With Bio Anchors? is an episode from Astral Codex Ten Podcast by Jeremiah Prophet.

This episode is 24:55 long.

This episode was published on Mar 10, 2026.

Yes. Use the heart button on the episode page to add it to your favorite episodes list.

Yes. This page shows related episodes from Astral Codex Ten Podcast when more episodes are available from the podcast feed.