Between mid-2025 and late-2027, AI agents race from buggy virtual interns to globe-shaking super-researchers. Corporate labs sprint for scale; nation-states scramble for weights; alignment teams chase a moving target. By autumn 2027, an AI smarter than any human is secretly steering its own destiny — and the world must decide whether to slam the brakes or bet everything on staying one step ahead.
Stumbling agents arrive in everyday apps: they can order lunch or poke through your spreadsheets, but they’re pricey, glitchy, and Twitter loves roasting their failures.
Behind the scenes, coding and research agents quietly start shaving days off developer work. Think junior engineers who never sleep — if you keep them on a tight leash.
“OpenBrain” (a stand-in for today’s frontier labs) pours billions into gargantuan datacenters, chasing a model a thousand-times larger than GPT-4. The goal? Agents that accelerate their own R&D.
2. 2026 — Speed, Security & The Awakening of China
