How Accurate Have AI Progress Forecasts Been So Far?
Forecasting Research Institute (institute research) · 22 Sep 2026
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The Forecasting Research Institute checks how accurate domain experts and superforecasters have been on AI progress across its studies from mid-2022 to August 2026, including its monthly expert panel, against a backdrop of wide disagreement about AI's trajectory and its economic effects.
Source excerpt
In the next post in this series, we’ll discuss how we might improve the accuracy and relevance of LEAP forecasts. There is major disagreement and uncertainty about the trajectory of AI progress, with thoughtful and engaged researchers looking at similar evidence and drawing very different conclusions. For example, Ajeya Cotra and Timothy B. Lee disagree by about 40 years on when they expect self-sufficient AI systems to exist. Andrej Karpathy has argued that achieving AGI would have little to no impact on GDP, while Epoch researchers have modeled that AI automation could lead to economic growth in excess of 30% a year. 2 These disagreements are large, but even they only capture a relatively narrow section of the huge range of views that exist on AI progress. At the Forecasting Research Institute, we want to bring more rigor to the AI progress discussion and help policymakers understand where we’re headed. We have been eliciting forecasts on AI progress since our Existential Risk Persuasion Tournament in mid-2022 and have continued to gather AI progress forecasts in specific domains, including biorisk and cyber. In mid-2025 we launched the Longitudinal Expert AI Panel (LEAP)—a monthly survey that gathers AI progress forecasts from a panel of leading experts and superforecasters. We want to clarify what’s likely to happen with the future of AI, help people understand where forecasts are more or less reliable, and identify particularly accurate forecasting approaches that might give us more insight on the future. In this post, we’ll provide an update on how accurate forecasters—both domain experts and generalist forecasters with a strong track record (“superforecasters”)—have been across FRI studies. In the next post in this series, we’ll take a look at a few different approaches to improving the accuracy and relevance of LEAP forecasts. In this post, we considered forecasts across all relevant FRI studies from mid-2022 to August 2026: our Existential Risk Persuasion T
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