2023 – Chatbots
•Fluent text generators
•Still hallucinate heavily
•No memory, no tools, no autonomy
2024 – Reasoners
•Chain-of-thought, scratchpads
•First signs of problem-solving and logic
•Emergent planning and coding
•Tools become common (e.g. calculators, code interpreters)
2025 – Agents
•Take actions across the web (Operator, Manus)
•Simple autonomy (book a flight, write a report)
•Real business use cases begin
•Robotics + vision kicking in
2026 – Autonomous Collaborators
•Work across sessions with memory
•Handle end-to-end workflows with minimal oversight
•Small orgs powered by 1 human + 10 agents
•Multi-agent teamwork emerges
2027 – Self-Improving Researchers
•Agents able to write & run experiments, improve themselves
•Scientific discovery begins to accelerate
•Feedback loops shorten dramatically (papers, code, data)
2028 – Autonomous Organizations
•Entire orgs run by AI agents with human supervision
•Real coordination across departments (finance, ops, marketing)
•Human-AI hybrid companies become standard
2029 – Proto-AGI
•General-purpose agents with durable goals
•Learn new domains on the fly
•Begin outperforming average humans on knowledge work
2030 – AGI v1
•Consistent reasoning, learning, adaptation
•Can teach itself new skills
•Starts to feel like a colleague, not a tool
2031–2035 – Intelligence Explosion / ASI Phase
•Recursive self-improvement kicks in
•Intelligence grows faster than humans can track
•Societal transformation: work, science, economics, and ethics all shift
•New paradigms emerge we can’t fully predict