Nathan Lambert, author of the newsletter Interconnects, says publicly that he doesn't expect an "intelligence explosion" by early 2028.

Concept illustration on a peach background: in the centre a tall red rocket lettered INTELLIGENCE EXPLOSION stands on three legs, its tip rising past a black horizontal line drawn across the picture, with a ribbed tube running from its base and coiling on the floor to the left and a tape measure beside its right leg. Six people sit typing at laptops on desks in a row, three on each side of the rocket; at the upper right a dashed box holds four desks with laptops and empty office chairs, large black opening quotation marks sit at the upper left, and a black silhouette of a person at the lower right extends an open hand toward the left. Printed on the image: Early 2028 Lambert personally expects no "intelligence explosion" by then.

This is Lambert's personal judgment with no data attached, and Lambert also writes that he isn't sure how an intelligence explosion should be measured. Lambert's view is that, at a minimum, an intelligence explosion would not show up as mass unemployment in knowledge work or an AI-driven stock-market boom (Nathan Lambert, 2026-11-10). Tamay Besiroglu, cofounder of the startup Mechanize, wrote the same day that the AI-risk community increasingly thinks an intelligence explosion could come next year. Besiroglu expects it to be clear within a few years that it didn't happen (Tamay Besiroglu, 2026-11-10). On the other side, Daniel Kokotajlo of the AI Futures Project wrote on November 5 that if Anthropic's R&D really doubles in speed, the timeline to superintelligence could be very short (Daniel Kokotajlo, 2026-11-05). How we checked →

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Nov 11, 2026, alongside 15 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Nathan Lambert, author of the newsletter Interconnects, says publicly that he doesn't expect an "intelligence explosion" by early 2028.." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-11-11-2/. Accessed access date.