Not a catalogue of scary AI stories, and not a reading list for optimists. Both cases are given the same seriousness, because a person deciding what to think needs the strongest version of each.
An extrapolation-driven argument that AGI by 2027 follows from straight lines on graphs, with national-security consequences.
Why read it. Whether or not the trendlines hold, this document shaped how a lot of capital and policy attention got allocated.
An early, contested claim that GPT-4 showed general-intelligence characteristics.
Why read it. A case study in the evaluation problem: the disagreement was about what counts, not about what the model did.
Showed that loss falls predictably with compute, data and parameters, which turned capability into a budgeting exercise.
Why read it. The empirical basis for every timeline argument in either direction.
Seven hundred words arguing that general methods leveraging computation beat human-designed structure, every time, eventually.
Why read it. The shortest item in this library and among the most consequential.
The transformer architecture. Everything in the current debate runs on top of this paper.
Why read it. Provenance: the whole argument has a technical origin, and this is it.