[Linkpost] “Timelines to what? A proposal” by tlevin

This is a link post. This post was crossposted from Multiplier with the author's permission, by the Forum team. The author may not see comments. Subtitle: Why you might want to DIAL in to short timelines People in the AI field love to talk about “timelines.” Sophisticated people in the AI field love to ask: “timelines to what?” Automation of AI R&D? (By which metric?) AI that far surpasses humans at nearly all cognitive tasks, or “TEDAI”? Artificial general intelligence? Something more ambitious? Those answers are each about what AI can do. In this post, I argue that in timelines discussions, we should ask not what AI can do, but what we can do to shape AI outcomes. More precisely: The default answer to “timelines to what?” should be “when the most important decisions will get made”[1]; We should think of those decisions as having a distribution, not a deadline; Your own decisions related to that distribution need to account for how your leverage varies in different timelines. In other words, the key timeline is the DIAL (Decision Importance, Adjusted for Leverage) Distribution. The distribution of decision importance Let's say you’re considering the social impact implications of a career [...] --- First published: June 11th, 2026 Source: Linkpost URL: --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO . --- Images from the article: Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts , or another podcast app.