Back
What's the Short Timeline Plan
blogAuthor
Credibility Rating
3/5
Good(3)Good quality. Reputable source with community review or editorial standards, but less rigorous than peer-reviewed venues.
Rating inherited from publication venue: Alignment Forum
Written by Marius Hobbhahn of Apollo Research in January 2025, this post synthesizes near-term AI safety priorities under short-timeline assumptions and is notable for prompting community discussion on the absence of detailed public safety roadmaps.
Metadata
Importance: 72/100blog postanalysis
Summary
Marius Hobbhahn outlines a two-layer safety plan for scenarios where transformative AI arrives soon, arguing that current publicly available strategies are insufficiently detailed. Layer 1 focuses on near-term controls like CoT monitoring, AI control, and evals; Layer 2 addresses deeper alignment research including interpretability and scalable oversight.
Key Points
- •Short AI timelines are treated as plausible, requiring concrete safety plans that go beyond vague aspirations.
- •Layer 1 priorities: maintaining human-legible chain-of-thought, improved monitoring, AI control methods, scheming detection, robust evals, and security.
- •Layer 2 priorities: improved near-term alignment strategies, interpretability, scalable oversight, reasoning transparency, and safety-first organizational culture.
- •The post expresses concern that detailed, publicly available short-timeline safety plans are largely absent from the AI safety community.
- •The author acknowledges known limitations and open questions, framing the post as a prompt for community discussion rather than a finished blueprint.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Short AI Timeline Policy Implications | Analysis | 62.0 |
Cached Content Preview
HTTP 200Fetched Apr 7, 202655 KB
Dec
JAN
Feb
16
2025
2026
2027
success
fail
About this capture
COLLECTED BY
Collection: Common Crawl
Web crawl data from Common Crawl.
TIMESTAMPS
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20260116190821/https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/bb5Tnjdrptu89rcyY/what-s-the-short-timeline-plan
x
This website requires javascript to properly function. Consider activating javascript to get access to all site functionality.
AI ALIGNMENT FORUM
AF
Login
What’s the short timeline plan? — AI Alignment Forum
AI ControlAI EvaluationsDeceptive AlignmentAI TimelinesAI
Frontpage
2025 Top Fifty: 5%
130
What’s the short timeline plan?
by Marius Hobbhahn
2nd Jan 2025
28 min read
51
130
This is a low-effort post (at least, it was intended as such ...). I mostly want to get other people’s takes and express concern about the lack of detailed and publicly available plans so far. This post reflects my personal opinion and not necessarily that of other members of Apollo Research. I’d like to thank Ryan Greenblatt, Bronson Schoen, Josh Clymer, Buck Shlegeris, Dan Braun, Mikita Balesni, Jérémy Scheurer, and Cody Rushing for comments and discussion.
I think short timelines, e.g. AIs that can replace a top researcher at an AGI lab without losses in capabilities by 2027, are plausible. Some people have posted ideas on what a reasonable plan to reduce AI risk for such timelines might look like (e.g. Sam Bowman’s checklist, or Holden Karnofsky’s list in his 2022 nearcast), but I find them insufficient for the magnitude of the stakes (to be clear, I don’t think these example lists were intended to be an extensive plan).
If we take AGI seriously, I feel like the AGI companies and the rest of the world should be significantly more prepared, and I think we’re now getting into the territory where models are capable enough that acting without a clear plan is irresponsible.
In this post, I want to ask what such a short timeline plan could look like. Intuitively, if an AGI lab came to me today and told me, “We really fully believe that we will build AGI by 2027, and we will enact your plan, but we aren’t willing to take more than a 3-month delay,” I want to be able to give the best possible answer. I list some suggestions but I don’t think they are anywhere near sufficient. I’d love to see more people provide their answers. If a funder is interested in funding this, I’d also love to see some sort of “best short-timeline plan prize” where people can win money for the best plan as judged by an expert panel.
In particular, I think the AGI companies should publish their detailed plans (minus secret information) so that governments, academics, and civil society can criticize and improve them. I think RSPs were a great step in the right direction and did improve their reasoning transparency
... (truncated, 55 KB total)Resource ID:
145e6d684253d6f0 | Stable ID: sid_wSirZtFZVz