AI systems are approaching the capability to autonomously build their own successors by end of 2028, with coding and scientific skills advancing rapidly across multiple benchmarks.

The author estimates a 60%+ likelihood that no-human-involved AI R&D — an AI system powerful enough to autonomously build its own successor — occurs by the end of 2028, based on public information from arXiv, bioRxiv, NBER papers, and frontier company deployments.

AI coding ability has advanced dramatically: Claude 2 achieved ~2% on SWE-Bench (a test of real-world software engineering problem-solving) in late 2023, while Claude Mythos Preview now reaches 93.9%. Separately, AI systems' ability to complete tasks independently has grown from ~30 seconds (GPT 3.5 in 2022) to ~6 hours (GPT 5.2 High in 2025) to ~12 hours (Opus 4.6 in 2026), with forecasters expecting ~100 hours by end of 2026.

The author expects a proof-of-concept where a model end-to-end trains its successor within a year or two at the non-frontier model stage, though frontier models may take longer due to cost and human effort involved.