AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu

ℹ️ EPISODE INFO

Released

April 17, 2025

Duration

3h 9m

Channel

Dwarkesh Podcast

Watch on YouTube

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📝 EPISODE DESCRIPTION

Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu have 2045+ timelines, think the whole "alignment" framing is wrong, don't think an intelligence explosion is plausible, but are convinced we'll see explosive economic growth (with the economy literally doubling every 1 or 2 years). This discussion offers a totally different scenario than my recent interview with Scott and Daniel. Ege and Tamay are the co-founders of Mechanize (disclosure - I’m an angel investor), a startup dedicated to fully automating work. Before founding Mechanize, Ege and Tamay worked on AI forecasts at Epoch AI. 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊𝐒

• Transcript: https://www.dwarkesh.com/p/ege-tamay
• Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/agi-is-still-30-years-away-ege-erdil-tamay-besiroglu/id1516093381?i=1000703894255
• Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/68eeIiy3mT6PRlrTej9dtq?si=8bd51bdc846e47f6

𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒

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• Scale’s Data Foundry gives major AI labs access to high-quality data to fuel post-training, including advanced reasoning capabilities. If you’re an AI researcher or engineer, learn about how Scale’s Data Foundry and research lab, SEAL, can help you go beyond the current frontier at https://scale.com/dwarkesh

• Google's Gemini Pro 2.5 is THE model we use the most at Dwarkesh Podcast: it helps us generate transcripts, identify interesting clips, and code up new tools. Check out our internal Gemini powered tools here: https://huggingface.co/spaces/dwarkesh/transcriber, https://huggingface.co/spaces/dwarkesh/producer. And if you want to try it for yourself, it's now available in Preview with higher rate limits! Start building with it today at https://aistudio.google.com To sponsor a future episode, visit https://dwarkesh.com/advertise. 𝐓𝐈𝐌𝐄𝐒𝐓𝐀𝐌𝐏𝐒 00:00:00 - AGI will take another 3 decades 00:23:01 - Even reasoning models lack animal intelligence 00:45:38 - Intelligence explosion 01:01:31 - Ege & Tamay's story 01:06:58 - Explosive economic growth 01:33:34 - Will there be a separate AI economy? 01:47:42 - Can we predictably influence the future? 02:20:22 - Arms race dynamic 02:30:22 - Is superintelligence a real thing? 02:36:19 - Reasons not to expect explosive growth 02:49:34 - Fully automated firms 02:55:17 - Will central planning work?

🎤 SPEAKERS

• Ege Erdil

  guest

• Tamay Besiroglu

  guest

• Dwarkesh Patel

  host

🧾 EPISODE SUMMARY

In this episode of Dwarkesh Podcast, featuring Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu, AGI is still 30 years away — Ege Erdil & Tamay Besiroglu explores why AGI Might Be Decades Away: Intelligence Isn’t the Bottleneck Anymore Dwarkesh Patel interviews Ege Erdil and Tamay Besiroglu about why they expect AGI and full remote-work automation closer to the 2040s, not the 2020s, despite rapid recent AI progress.

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