A tournament tried to test how well experts could forecast AI progress. They were all wrong.

Two boxing robots from Unitree at Shanghai New Expo Center on July 28, 2025. | Ying Tang/NurPhoto via Getty Images Two of the smartest people I follow in the AI world recently sat down to check in on how the field is going. One was François Chollet, creator of the widely used Keras library and author of the ARC-AGI benchmark, which tests if AI has reached “general” or broadly human-level intelligence. Chollet has a reputation as a bit of an AI bear, eager to deflate the most boosterish and over-optimistic predictions of where the technology is going. But in the discussion, Chollet sai