For decades people have argued about whether machines will one day outrun us. The singularity is the name for that moment: machines getting smarter so fast that the world changes faster than anyone can keep up with. The step before it is artificial general intelligence, or AGI, a machine that can do most of the thinking work a person can. Some say it is decades away, some say it is already starting, and the trouble is agreeing on what would count as an answer.
I am John Fredrickson, and I built this site, the AGI Zeitgeist Tracker, to follow that argument. "Zeitgeist" is a German word for the mood of a time: what people are saying and what they expect. The site records what two groups have said about AGI, with every quote dated and linked to where it was said. One is the academics and writers who have talked about this for decades. The other is the people who run the AI companies, who are actually building it and who tend to run well ahead of the evidence with their predictions. Both belong in the picture, and the point is to see how the talk has moved, not to score anyone.
The talk has moved a long way. Geoffrey Hinton, a computer scientist whose work underlies today's AI, said "no sooner than 2070" in 2015 and "between five and 20 years" in 2025. Gary Marcus, a psychologist and the best-known critic of today's AI, said "at least thirty or fifty years" in 2016 and "10-25 years" in 2025 (what people have said). Beside that record, the site asks a harder question, are we in the singularity yet, and sets a test that anyone can check.
Why the Test Needs Four Parts
Each of the classic descriptions of the singularity, taken alone, gives false alarms. A fast decade in any industry looks like runaway progress. A company can say its AI now does its own research, and nobody outside can check. Every new technology makes old forecasts look foolish, the internet included. So the test asks for several signs at once, and adds one that is measured outside the AI world: whether the world's economy has started growing far faster than it ever has. I set the line each part has to cross on 8 October 2026, before looking at where the numbers stood, so that I could not move the lines to suit the answer.
The four parts each come from a well-known thinker:
- The pace. From the futurist Ray Kurzweil, the idea that AI gets better faster and faster. METR, a research group that tests AI systems, gives them computer-programming jobs of known length, measured by how long a skilled person would take, and records the longest job the best AI can finish by itself. Those jobs keep getting longer. In 2019 their length doubled every 188 days, and now it doubles every 121. This part would count once the length doubles every 30 days, and the doubling is still getting faster (the four parts).
- Forecasts. From the writer Vernor Vinge, the idea that nobody can predict AI progress any more. This part cannot be scored yet, because it needs a record of old predictions set against what then happened, and that record has not been built.
- AI doing the research. From the mathematician I. J. Good, the idea that AI ends up doing most of the work of improving AI. Anthropic, an AI company, says its own AI leads 26 percent of its AI research. This part would count once AI does half of that work, and only the company can check its figure.
- The economy. From the economist Robin Hanson, the idea that the world's economy starts growing ten times faster than it ever has. It grew 2.9 percent in 2025, and this part would count once it grows 30 percent in a single year.
Where the Numbers Stand
The test's answer, as of 18 October 2026, is "Not yet." All four parts would have to cross their lines and stay across for a year, and none of them has.
A plain "not yet" says nothing about whether anything is moving, so the top of the home page also gives the average of how far the three measurable parts have come towards their own lines: 32 percent. The pace is 43 percent of the way. AI's share of the research is 52 percent of the way, because 26 is a little over half of its line of 50. The economy is at 0 percent: growth of 2.9 percent is below the economy's own long-run average, so it has come none of the way (the four parts). The economy is always named beside the average, because the test needs every part to cross, so the slowest part holds the answer back. The 32 percent is not a forecast. With the economy at zero, the test as a whole has not begun to pass.
If current trends simply continued, AI's share of the research would cross its line in 2027 and the pace somewhere between 2028 and 2048, but the economy would not cross at all (the four parts). On current trends, then, the test is not met.
The Most Interesting News So Far
The pace part has lost its source. A check of the sources on 16 October 2026 found that METR's page of measurements now says it is no longer actively updated, as of 8 September 2026. METR also says its tests cannot measure jobs longer than 16 hours, and the best AI has already passed that. Without a replacement, the pace part will soon have nothing current to measure. The test's rules say a replacement must be named first, with a stretch of time where old and new overlap so they can be compared. On 17 October 2026 I wrote to METR to ask whether a new version is planned, and if not, which public measure they would point to. No answer is on the record yet (every dated change to the method).
The economy is the part that keeps the test honest. I also ran the test on the years 1995 to 2019, years when the test ought to say no, to see whether it would give a false alarm. It did not, but only because of the economy. The pace measure only starts in 2019, so I used a rougher stand-in for it, and the stand-in would have crossed the pace line on its own in 2014. I added the economy part on 8 October 2026 because it is the only part measured outside the AI field, knowing that it reacts years after the technology and so will usually be the part furthest behind. It is what stops the test from finding a singularity that exists only on paper.
How to Follow It
Every Monday morning, from 19 October 2026, a scheduled check reads the past week from the site's sources. It can add new figures and flag things for me to decide, but it never changes how anything is scored (how the weekly check works). When it finds something that moves a number you follow, I will write it up here and say why it matters, and a quiet week gets no post. The method says how the record was built and who did what. Think a number here is wrong? Here's how to tell me, and what happens next.
What to Watch For
The biggest open question is METR's answer, or a new version of its measurements, which would settle what the pace part is scored on from here.
AI's share of the research sits closest to its line, but it rests on only two figures from Anthropic so far, under 1 percent in February 2026 and 26 percent in August (the company's page). The next figure will show whether it is still climbing towards half.
For the economy, the World Bank has not yet published a figure for 2026. When it does, the economy part will move off zero only if growth beats its own long-run average (the four parts).
Next to arrive is a fuller record of what the people who run the AI companies have said about the future, in their own words and with their dates, so that anyone can see how their talk has moved. Sam Altman, who runs OpenAI, wrote in June 2025 that "2026 will likely see the arrival of systems that can figure out novel insights" (the quote, with its source). Where a date passes, the record notes in a line what happened.
Updated 2026-10-19: I opened that record the next day, with 325 dated predictions from fifteen people (the claims page).
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