My predictions for 2026:
Coding and Mathematics AGI
- METR 50% time horizons above 24 hours - my mean estimate is 30.8 hours, 2 day time horizons possible within frontier labs when accounting for 60 day lag
- if 2025 was the year of agents, then 2026 will be the year of multi-agent systems
- agents delegating work to subagents -> the start of the agent economy and the great unhobbling!
Most of our current math and coding benchmarks will get saturated!
- Epoch Capabilities Index ( > 175 )
- FrontierMath Levels 1-3 ( > 95% )
- ARC-AGI 1 and 2 ( > 95% )
- SimpleQA verified ( > 95% )
- Simple-Bench ( > 90% )
- SWE-Bench-verified ( > 90% )
- Terminal-Bench 2 ( > 90% )
- WeirdML v2 ( > 85% )
- Humanities Last Exam ( > 80% )
- FrontierMath Level 4 ( > 75% )
- Cybench ( > 70% )
- GDPval ( > 70 % win rate, no ties)
- GSO ( > 65% )
- ARC-AGI-3 ( > 60% and > 80% if they go for o3-preview comparable compute budgets or continual learning breakthrough happens)
- more evals like gdpval that capture economic value of models and systems
- big focus white collar work and large acceleration of science: specifically i see acceleration in medicine, biology, chemistry, finance, legal, administrative work
- automation of white collar work will be enabled by having reliable and fast computer use agents
- reliable computer use agents will also have implications for how you use the internet. this is OpenAI's big goal: become the hub to the internet and delegate shopping and whatever to agents!
Big models launches to get hyped for in 2026:
- Claude 5 - Claude 5.5
- Gemini 3.5 - Gemini-4
- GPT-5.3 - GPT-6
(everything in between possible, but Gemini 4 ~ 80%, Claude 5.5 ~ 70%, GPT-6 ~ 60% likely before 2027)
- DeepSeek-V4
- Grok-5
- Qwen-4
- Kimi-K3, GLM-5, MiniMax M3
- more korean models and a bunch of american open-source models :)
The gap between closed and open labs will narrow in H1 2026 due to DeepSeek-V4, then widen in the later half of the year, especially on economically valuable tasks.
Closed models will be much more reliable. But we will still have Opus 4.5+ level open models by the end of 2026.
Most frontier models will be around 5-10T params. If we see GPT-6 and Gemini-4 at the end of 2026 10T+ param models are possible. These models + harnesses will be the first not research agents. We should also see much better live models with voice and video mode.
Model architecture:
- we will see both, more efficient architectures and more expressive architectures!
- hybrid architectures for even longer context windows, diffusion models for speed on edge devices, but also models that double down on full attention or even more expressive attention mechanisms
- looped language models, other recurrent architectures and continual learning will enable much smaller reasoning models! (TRM on ARC-AGI has paved the way for the reasoning core)
- big improvements in reasoning efficiency
in my 2025 prediction I included a prediction for 2026 that I stand by:
- "someone (Anthropic) figures out efficient test-time-training [...], this will be the next paradigm for 2026 and lead to superintelligence"
General outlook and some random thoughts:
- it will be clear to everybody that Anthropic has the mandate and is ahead of everyone else
- OpenAI, Anthropic and Google will remain frontier labs
- decent chance that Anthropic overtakes OpenAI's valuation and both are valued > 1T
- DeepSeek will join them with V4 as THE chinese frontier lab
- xAI will likely repeat Grok-4, Grok-5 will be great on benchmarks but Elon persists on slop-maxxing the model
- AI generated video content will take off with Veo-4 and Sora-3, consistent minute long videos will be possible
- embodied intelligence will start to take off by RL through world models
- full self-driving solved, waymo and tesla everywhere
- the stock market will have a 20%+ drawdown
- 15% chance of OpenAI going bankrupt and getting acquired by Microsoft due to collapse of oracle or a market crash, caused by rapidly deteriorating economic situation (unemployment, inflation)
- push against AI will become a common theme in most advanced western economies as unemployment rises
- populist right wing parties continue to gain traction in europe
- trump/republicans will lose midterm elections
