# Seed AI by 2010, to outrace nanotech

> To have a good chance of outracing nanotech, we should plan to develop a seed AI by 2010.

Canonical URL: https://foom.hyperplex.org/p/plan

Chapter: SL4 / Plan to Singularity

Category: timelines & doom

Predicted: 1999

Resolution date: 2010

Status: falsified by events

Status detail: The prediction was resolved as falsified by events in 2010

Original source label: The Plan to Singularity, 1999–2000

## Resolution

2010 came. No seed AI, no nanotech, no race. He'd already called the plan a folly in 2008.

## Context and outcome

The Plan treated Drexlerian nanotechnology as a doomsday deadline. If it arrived around 2010, a seed AI would need to be developed first; ideally by 2005, and no later than 2010. He advertised the prediction with a T-shirt reading “Singularity 2005.”

In the 2008 “Coming of Age” sequence he framed the whole plan as The Sheer Folly Of Callow Youth. Then 2010 passed without seed AI or Drexlerian nanotechnology.

## Supporting receipts

> To win, we need to create an AI. To avoid losing, we need to outrace nanotechnology. … To have a good chance of outracing nanotech, we should plan to develop a seed AI by 2010.

Context: The plan's core framing of AI as a race against nanotechnology, with a 2010 seed-AI deadline.

Source: [The Plan to Singularity (1999)](https://web.archive.org/web/20100727182235/http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html)

> I'll be overjoyed if we have 'till 2020 to create a seed AI, but it's increasingly looking like the deadline may be more on the order of 2005. That's not impossible, but it's damned tenuous.

Context: From the 'If nanotech comes first' section, moving the deadline earlier to roughly 2005.

Source: [The Plan to Singularity (1999)](https://web.archive.org/web/20100727182235/http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html)

> I would not realistically expect a substantial user base before four years have passed, making my "Singularity 2005" T-Shirt a touch unrealistic... but we can always hope.

Context: Schedule slippage measured against his own 'Singularity 2005' T-shirt; the ellipsis is in the original.

Source: [The Plan to Singularity (1999)](https://web.archive.org/web/20100727182235/http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html)

## Sources

- [The Plan to Singularity (wayback)](https://web.archive.org/web/2002/http://yudkowsky.net/obsolete/plan.html)
- [The Sheer Folly of Callow Youth](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Yicjw6wSSaPdb83w9/the-sheer-folly-of-callow-youth)