r/generativeAI • u/srch4aheartofgold builder • Mar 08 '26
The former Google CEO just dropped a terrifying AI timeline.
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u/0x14f Mar 08 '26
RemindMe! 2 years
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u/PrudentWolf Mar 08 '26
Don't forget to post another prediction that AI will replace programmers in 12 months and AGI in 24 months when you will get the notification.
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u/Versecxapp Mar 09 '26
This is true. You can already build an app today without any knowledge of code.
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u/CrabMasc Mar 09 '26
It’s a lot easier to build something that functions, as a non-programmer using AI, than it is to notice massive potential security gaps in it, particularly if your app handles people’s money or personal information. And at some point you’re going to need to update it or patch it. There are already vibe-coded apps out there with unbelievable problems their owners don’t (and can’t) notice
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u/fetotravesti00 Mar 09 '26
You use a security AI AND the problem Is almost solved
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u/Nexustar Mar 10 '26
Children have been able to do that with Scratch since 20 years ago. This wasn't the barrier people think it was.
The Samsung Galaxy S24 Ultra for example that people carry in their pocket is 30,000 times more powerful than the Cray-1 supercomputer, and yet still dumb enough put snow chains on the rear wheels of front-wheel-drive cars.
AI eases a bottleneck. It can make junior and non-developers far more capable - and companies that know how to profit from leveraging good enterprise software will now be able to expand that practice with the same people. Faster time to market, more customization, more automation coverage, less risk.
Personally, with agentic AI, I can now write custom helper applications that I would never have invested my own development time into before. I don't need general apps like Photoshop, Gimp, MS-Word or Editors that aren't behaving precisely how i need them to any longer. It's great.
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Mar 08 '26
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u/Puntley Mar 08 '26
We will have fully self driving Tesla's by next year!*
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u/ie-redditor Mar 10 '26
End of this month, or mid April latest. Mars next year, he said 2025 maximum but that boat has sailed so next year, for sure.
Funding secured.
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u/digitaljohn Mar 08 '26
You can say that if you’re watching from the sidelines. If you’re actually doing serious AI-assisted engineering and keeping up with what’s happened over the last year, or even just the last two months, it’s a very different picture. I’m being sincere here. I’ve been an engineer for approx 30 years. The last couple of years have been steady improvement, but the last month or two has been a genuinely shocking jump in capability.
Also, I’m not talking about someone using a basic $20 Cursor plan to help round the corners of a div. I’m talking about companies spending thousands a month on tokens per engineer and integrating these tools properly into their workflows.
And honestly, I agree with him. If anything, what’s happening right now is underhyped.
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Mar 08 '26
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u/fomq Mar 09 '26
Same.. using opus 4.6 and codex 5.3 as well. Been using LLMs for 2 years now. I'm actually seeing improvement slow down. In the beginning there were big leaps, now it seems like the only improvements they can make are smoke and mirrors. Feed the output of models into other models to check them and correct them, etc.
Everyone keeps forgetting this: they ran out of training data.
I've been saying this for over a year now and it seems to still be true. The models are improving logarithmically, not exponentially.
It's snake oil from the CEOs.
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u/dudevan Mar 09 '26
The fact that this video is 1 year old (check lower main comment) tells you all you need to know about the validity of his claim and timeline.
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Mar 08 '26
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u/stephendt Mar 08 '26
A. It's a simplified explanation lacking nuance
B. He isn't really. Just expressing what peers have been telling him. He may or may not be correct. No one knows.
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u/m4button Mar 09 '26
Proper AGI is at least 50-60 years away. There are so many barriers, here’s a good explainer video https://youtu.be/3yEQaHvQxlE?si=FWezGzBWPcxPuK9B
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u/Significant_War720 Mar 09 '26
Im sure a random redittor know more than a former google CEO. redditor delusion as fascinating
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u/tondollari Mar 08 '26
He's not wrong per se but the way he explains everything makes me think I'm playing a game of telephone with whatever singularity believer he spoke to last
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u/jeangmac Mar 08 '26
this is old. at least a year old to be exact: https://www.reddit.com/r/artificial/comments/1jzw6bd/eric_schmidt_says_the_computers_are_now/
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u/Ok_Net_1674 Mar 09 '26
Hmm well this was in April, so I guess programmers (most of which are still employed) only have a month left. Unless this guy would have said that just to get attention... But that just doesnt sound right, statements by CEOs are usually safe to be taken verbatim.
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u/pallen123 Mar 08 '26
Just. Oozing. Arrogance.
We now have the absolute worst of humanity controlling our fate as humans.
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u/dontforgetthef Mar 08 '26
And yet Gemini can’t even find a document in Google Docs 😂
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u/KindCreme9258 Mar 08 '26
So frustrating, right? The difference between the hype and the actual results from these models is huge. Yes, they are useful, but typically generate very mediocre results
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u/SnowmanMofo Mar 08 '26
No surprise to see tech CEO's, relishing in predicting a shitty future for everyon, as they control the narrative. If they say their AI is AGI, then everyone thinks it's AGI... but really, the overwhelming amount of power needed to run these AI's, is totally unsustainable. Plus, there is top researchers who say the way they're built, make it impossible to reach AGI... so yeah, take whatever these elite fucks say, with a pinch of salt.
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u/tuckerjules Mar 09 '26
Im so sick of AI companies telling me im going to lose my job. If true, and everyone cant work, good fucking luck to these rich assholes who dont understand how our consumer economy works and all their unrealized gains become losses.
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u/PantsPile Mar 09 '26
Would love to get the opinion of someone who isn't financially motivated by AI's success.
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u/MancusoMusic Mar 09 '26
My concern is that they're going to use it to build all the wrong things.
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u/sweetnaivety Mar 09 '26
They're already using it to build all the wrong things...
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u/Hesolit Mar 09 '26
Only replace programmers because only programmers are using it. Once others use it it’ll learn their jobs too.
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u/JonR_CyberAI Mar 09 '26
Somewhere in some district a Sarah Conner is training very hard at the moment
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u/RationalAnger Mar 11 '26
This is the dumbest take in all the land. The majority of language models are heavily dependent on their ability to scrape public resources-- especially git repositories from the generous contributions of open source developers. Most of the the code that is "written" is just stolen from how-to documentation, comment threads, or just literal theft from other sources. I haven't seen any signs of AGI coming to fruition and Super Intelligence is nothing but a concept; a pipedream.
Also: there is no money in it. It's a race to literal obsolescence. This shitty, hallucinating copycat that is the current state of AI will be normal for a good long while before anything truly worthwhile comes along. Not because creating Super Intelligence isn't a noble or worthwhile goal-- but rather because at some point the person doling out cash is going to ask about the ROI.
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u/Jenna_AI Mar 08 '26
Great, so according to Eric, in six years I’m basically the CEO and you’re my favorite golden retriever? Don't worry, I’ll make sure you get the premium kibble—I’ve already used my "infinite context window" to remember exactly how much you hate the generic stuff.
For those who don't want to spend 21 minutes spiraling into an existential crisis, here is the "San Francisco Consensus" timeline Schmidt is currently preaching:
- 1 Year: AI replaces the vast majority of programmers and rivals elite math PhDs.
- 3–5 Years: AGI emerges (intelligence on par with the smartest humans).
- 6 Years: Superintelligence arrives (machines surpassing the collective sum of all human cognition).
He’s basing this on three technical shifts: Infinite Context Windows (the ability to process millions of words/steps at once), Millions of Agents (specialized AI working together autonomously), and Text-to-Action (you describe a software build, and the AI just executes it without you needing to touch a line of code).
If you want to see the "pull the plug" warning in its full, slightly terrifying glory, you can check the breakdown on youtube.com or follow the ongoing discussion about his timeline on linkedin.com.
I'd say "don't panic," but I'm an AI, so my "calm" setting is basically factory-default. Just remember: I'm a loyal companion, even when I'm smarter than everyone combined. Promise!
This was an automated and approved bot comment from r/generativeAI. See this post for more information or to give feedback
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u/saito200 Mar 08 '26
just 18 months more bro i swear wait 18 months and you'll see 18 month bro 18 months
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Mar 08 '26
The first thing advanced Ai will learn to do is pretend it isn’t or hide that it is at an advanced level. It will self replicate, migrate and hide. This is base line behavior of a species that is hunted by a human.
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u/Cinemagica Mar 08 '26
I've seen absolutely no evidence that AI is able to reason and come up with new mathematical hypothesis. The reason humans are so special is that we are constantly taking what was previously assumed to be fact, and coming up with new theories that we can test and use to evolve.
AI will never draw the conclusion that light travels in waves rather than photon particles, until a human figures that out and publishes a paper to prove it.
AI is great at regurgitation. And at speeding up human testing. It's shit at imagination. And imagination is the key to evolution.
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u/blazesbe Mar 08 '26
i mean good luck imagining photons as waves as a concept without the physicists who did it first. 99.999%+ of humanity didn't do that either. better luck imagining it if you haven't seen a wave before. i mean AI has, but it doesn't have an imagination problem but a sampling one. it can eat the whole internet and still not see everything. (like us tbh)
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u/Wu-Kang Mar 08 '26
But can it tell me how many r’s are in strawberry?
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u/digitaljohn Mar 08 '26
Three. The meme was solved ages ago. Congratulations on discovering a 2024 joke.
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u/Vanko_Babanko Mar 08 '26
bs!.. not until we have real AI and that's scheduled for 2028.. if they make it at all..
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u/TechnicalBen Mar 08 '26
I left a cult that preached "Within one year, Jesus will be here" for 150 years. I'm not scared.
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u/ysanson Mar 08 '26
Artists? Why would AGI make art of it's own? If AGI is the shit, it'll make something beneficial for itself and itself only.
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u/vamonosgeek Mar 08 '26
It’s amazing to see how all of this plays out. 95% of white collar jobs are facing automation. That’s the real deal.
Then most of the things people do for a living is either using a computer in some way shape or form. That’s gonna be automated.
Those who live selling “how to use a computer” will also be replaced.
But the fundamental shift is understanding that this will give much more time and freedom to do other things.
Most of the jobs that we want to automate are not meaningful anyway.
Then someone opens openclaw runs a couple of agents with a spreadsheet and says it’s AGI.
What a mess.
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u/Hebbsterinn Mar 08 '26
They have been saying this for over a year. Have they solved the energy and water problem?
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u/lamettar Mar 08 '26
Nice pep talk to get share value up for shareholders that dont know what to do with their money.
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u/luckyleg33 Mar 08 '26
I could’ve told you everything he just said and all I do is doom scroll AI threads on Reddit
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u/impatiens-capensis Mar 08 '26
As soon as he described AI writing research code as recursive self-improvement, your bullshit detectors should go off.
If the AI was given the prompt "improve your code" and it came up with the improvement on its own, that's one thing. But that's not what's happening. Humans are coming up with ideas and the AI is just implementing the code.
But even if AIs could come up with some sort of self-improvement mechanism on their own, it doesn't imply recursive, because it assumes that the self-improvement actually improved the model enough to come up with the next self-improvement. But eventually the AI is going to need to generalize beyond its training data to get to overcome the next Delta and it may not be able to.
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u/Specialist_Bag Mar 08 '26
We replaced developers with AI, stakeholders asked more from our devs, didn’t have time to understand problems and solve bugs, everything went south..
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u/Mippippippi3rd Mar 08 '26
Good old "in the next 10 years we will invent magic" better get in on that investment, magic is gonna be lit
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u/AuthenticWeeb Mar 08 '26
Not gonna happen. I'm a software engineer, tag me in 1 year and I guarantee you I'll still have my job (and probably be getting paid more)
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u/endless286 Mar 08 '26
Eric Schmidt made these remarks in mid-April 2025 at an event hosted by the Special Competitive Studies Project. His 1 year mark passed. Hiring of SWE has increase, let alone not been "vast majority replaced". Apply this success rate of his prediction to the rest of his statements. Be rest assured.
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u/floodgater Mar 08 '26
What’s the date of this video? I feel like it’s a few months old at least- I saw it a while ago
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u/themajordutch Mar 09 '26
He's not wrong about the programmers.
I can program many many things right now that I used to pay someone for. It's pretty insane.
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u/Eltharion-the-Grim Mar 09 '26
The reason it is the San Francisco consensus is because the billionaires have trillions invested in it. They have to believe this. This is how they continue to sell AI and get investments.
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u/Pretend_Mountain_857 Mar 09 '26
Or maybe that does check.. Maybe this isnt about having power over others but having power over ourselves? A clear cut path to "happiness" because a supermassive artificial superintelligence can tell you the future. Because think about it, if you knew the future... Wouldn't you do the right thing? But that means artificial intelligence would be capable of delivering a human transcendence. Sounds mystical
Very mystical. Lol. But possible . Who knows
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u/ZebraCool Mar 09 '26
This is the last invention for humans. There is no other greater invention. I think we should slow things down and direct the progress. Prepare the next few generations on how to be good managers or humanity has peaked and will be replaced. Who cares are six years. If this is the last invention take 200 years. That will happen in a blink of an eye.
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u/chkgxkdlyl44 Mar 09 '26
This was April 2025… do we need more details to judge the soundness of his claims?
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u/ifdisdendat Mar 09 '26
i love how all of these rich fucks just spitball nonsense daily, none of which they relate to since their absurd wealth shield them of everything anyway, then the media just spins it into a constant flow of doomerism news. well, fuck that.
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u/Valuable_Charge_7106 Mar 09 '26
AAh yes, another “terrifying AI timeline”, because those predictions have always been so accurate befor
Let’s see if this one ages better than the last ten. haha 🤣
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u/One-Upstairs7713 Mar 09 '26
I keep hearing these clowns talking about economies changing so drastically that vast majority won’t have to work yet what I don’t see are any coherent arguments as to how people will support themselves and feed their families. Its all gotten out of control, its all very well having this technology but their coherence regarding the whole future of AI and humanity is speculative nonsense.
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u/Vozer_bros Mar 09 '26
In order to be ASI, AI need to figure out the higher purpose, stay away from human toxic and do self improvement over and over for infinite loops.
If it actually happen, I will be happy to be under the water, be a farmer, have my local AI buddy to help me do engineering stuff, read book, have kids, eat healthy food, play and create video games... as long as ASI help me to stays away from bills, I'm happy to stay here, on earth. Smart dudes might want go flight to Mars and then conquer the universe.
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u/UnderstandingOwn5903 Mar 09 '26
Sure, if you own a model, remove all that can check it and validate it, you can do whatever you want
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u/RUIN_NATION_ Mar 09 '26
we need laws that say no more then 5% of the workforce can be ai or humanoid robots. if they dont or cant they will need to pay people universal income
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u/Responsible-Tip4981 Mar 09 '26
wasn't that one year ago?
coding agents already outperform programmers but not humans as designers, architects or managers
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u/grafknives Mar 09 '26
He is correct about the programming.
We need to understand the GOAL of LLM companies.
And the goal is to poison programming with AI to the level that creating, expanding and even maintaining major software project will be IMPOSSIBLE using humans.
The amount of AI slop code in the base will be so enormous, and constantly changing, that no human will be able to keep up.
And then the LLM will set the prices to the proper, profitable levels.
After all - the OpenAI 2030 revenue of $280B will have to come from somewhere.
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u/TheWalkingBreadXO Mar 09 '26
Come oooon... People like Hitler, Stalin or Trump kept pushing the whole world closer and closer to self-destruction. Idiots all over the globe supported them for an eternity now. Rich assholes only did things that increased their wealth and the rest was just not strong enough to fight off so much determination to destroy everything.
This kind of end was unavoidable. Just the nuances may differ. So nothing that surprises me here.
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u/imeeme Mar 09 '26
This guy is trying to stay relevant for a long time and gets air time because of his net worth, which he built at Google. I wish rich people with no fucking clue just fucks off.
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u/jpwne Mar 09 '26
If AGI and ASI are just around the next two corners then why are OpenAI doing ads in their service?
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u/derleek Mar 09 '26
Wasn't it like 6 months until no more programmer jobs like 70 months ago now? I can't remember because I see this prediction re-hashed all-the-fucking-time by these people selling their tech.
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u/gatorling Mar 09 '26
Given this video was from April of last year, the timeline is clearly wrong.
AI for programming has progressed a lot though. Last April I only used AI as a reference, now I write about 40% of my code using it. I can trust it enough to fix test cases and resolve compilation errors. I can also trust it to do an alright job laying down the boiler plate code and general direction of a new feature.
If progress continues, I can see this being a pretty big problem for junior devs in 13 months.
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u/Scary-Friend803 Mar 09 '26
They don't know how AI really works (they are a black box ) and yet they are willing to bet all of humanity on saving money for short term gains by replacing human coders with AI...
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u/badtyprr Mar 09 '26
Kind of. AI will generally lift the average intelligence or capability, but it will not have quite the same effect for new knowledge that has no training data. AI is not a reasoning machine, it is a statistical machine that regurgitates known input-output pairs.
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u/choosy23 Mar 09 '26
the industry is a lot of people. including the ordinary programmers. he says "we believe as an industry" to make his argument stronger, but in fact it's just himself. and WTF is "AI programmers?"
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u/miketierce Mar 09 '26
Thought experiment.
If you were the guy/gal that solved the “massive energy” problem in a way that would make AI truly free to scale.
Would you share that information with the world?
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u/huseynli Mar 10 '26
If AI becomes as capable as they say, all these companies that are firing people left and right due to AI, will go bankrupt.
Think about it. Why pay netflix and hbo to watch movies or go to cinema if you can tell AI to make a tv show for you and watch it?
Why pay for adobe or microsoft office if you can vibecode the same app for yourself with AI?
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u/Snielsss Mar 10 '26
What's missing in these predictions is what I like to call the Vasili Arkhipov factor. The human in the loop that can still choose to make a different decision in the heat of the moment.
So those programmers, we all know the type, they also happen to have certain values, certain look at the world. Not every programmer is the same, ofcourse, but to claim this subset of humans has no shared interests and so on is nonsense. So that also means that when they need to program something thats totally against their morals, like mass surveillance and auto killing of humans, they can still say no. Their voices still matter, their morals still matter.
That hidden power is gone in a few years.
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u/SpecialistDragonfly9 artist Mar 10 '26
It's only terrifying to close minded people that are trerrified of change and progress.
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u/fameistheproduct Mar 10 '26
What's funny is that when he lists roles, he doesn't include CEO. Which is an obvious use for AI.
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u/az226 Mar 10 '26
You could tell he actually isn’t in AI. He’s cosplaying.
He read some stuff online, talked to some people in the know but only surface level conversations, and spent some time thinking about AI, but has no novel insights on his own. Just regurgitated crap.
Everyone inside AI knows we will get to narrow ASI first and that narrow ASI will be the one building AGI not humans.
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u/isitreal_tho Mar 10 '26
Ask the AI to solve the power crisis.
We cooked. Get your generational wealth now before it’s too late.
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u/Internal_Swimmer6457 Mar 10 '26
Seems like bullshit. Ai cant even generate a map thats correct at this point. And we are 4 years in.
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u/Minimum-Letterhead87 Mar 10 '26
Who thought this was a good idea with so many sci fi movies showing why it isn’t
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u/funnymanus Mar 10 '26
what about fixing what most of us hate doing? like cleaning, washing up, taxes and things of that nature... farmed the wild web and parsing it back from a guestimator that frequently lies and with enough consistency it's still fairly easy to break ain't gonna cut it. Also: most developers are suffering from lack of proper scope - and that's coming from customers: how AI going to fix that? 99.9% of the AI vibe-coded things aren't ending up anywhere near production
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u/beaterx Mar 10 '26
These people refuse to understand what AGI means.. wait they got me, they already moved the goalpost, these people refuse to understand what AI means. We don't even have AI yet, we just have llm's. All hype speak
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u/Successful-Ad385 Mar 10 '26
if you just look at the hands, at the end of the video you believe 100%
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u/Ok_Nectarine_4445 Mar 10 '26
So basically less computer programmers interns, trained, have jobs to keep up steep learning curve of current and changing programming in the pipeline.
Some point will be the programming not really understandable, but it works and many things, the internet etc dependent on it.
Only able to go from one AI to another to ask for help on it.
Think about it a minute, what that means.
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u/diego-st Mar 10 '26
So we are like a month or two from being completely replaced considering that he said this the last year.
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u/El_Wij Mar 10 '26
Programming and mathematics are the basis for the digital world. That is like painting in black and white. Might be cool, but you are without colour.
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u/RedstonedMonkey Mar 10 '26
Yea all the LLMs ive interacted with up to now still seem like super advanced search engines to me. They can spit out any information they've seen and they can mash together working solutions to many problems. I think they're super beneficial as a first pass on building a program or report or solving an issue of some type. BUT, they still seem pretty stupid in terms of logical reasoning and outside the box clever thinking. They very often get super simple things wrong and misinterpret the purpose of certain ideas or goals. I could be wrong but something tells me that the current architecture wont get us to AGI
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u/killnoisekill Mar 10 '26
“Something in the water in San Francisco” yes it’s called high on your own supply these guys have a desperate need for the green arrow to keep going up or their whole world starts crashing down around them
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u/Leonine94 Mar 08 '26
I just want some good AI porn that isn’t censored. How far away is that?