Author argues AI systems will autonomously build their own successors by end of 2028, citing advances in coding and scientific task automation

An AI researcher estimates a 60%+ likelihood that no-human-involved AI R&D—where an AI system autonomously builds its own successor—occurs by the end of 2028, based on public papers and deployed frontier model capabilities.

AI coding competency has advanced dramatically: Claude Mythos Preview achieves 93.9% on SWE-Bench (a real-world software engineering test), up from Claude 2's ~2% when the benchmark launched in late 2023. Meanwhile, AI systems' ability to complete complex tasks independently has grown from ~30 seconds in 2022 (GPT 3.5) to ~12 hours in 2026 (Opus 4.6), 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 stage, though frontier models may take longer due to scale and human effort requirements. This timeline reflects the convergence of improved coding, longer task horizons, and AI systems' growing ability to replicate research results and chain together machine learning techniques.