We'll see. The first two things that they said would move from "emerging tech" to "currently exists" by April 2026 are:
- "Someone you know has an AI boyfriend"
- "Generalist agent AIs that can function as a personal secretary"
I'd be curious how many people know someone that is sincerely in a relationship with an AI.
And also I'd love to know anyone that has honestly replaced their human assistant / secretary with an AI agent. I have an assistant, they're much more valuable beyond rote input-output tasks... Also I encourage my assistant to use LLMs when they can be useful like for supplementing research tasks.
Fundamentally though, I just don't think any AI agents I've seen can legitimately function as a personal secretary.
Also they said by April 2026:
> 22,000 Reliable Agent copies thinking at 13x human speed
And when moving from "Dec 2025" to "Apr 2026" they switch "Unreliable Agent" to "Reliable Agent". So again, we'll see. I'm very doubtful given the whole OpenClaw mess. Nothing about that says "two months away from reliable".
There are plenty of companies that sell an AI assistant that answers the phone as a service, they just aren't named OpenAI or Anthropic. They'll let callers book an appointment onto your calendar, even!
No, there are companies that sell voice activated phone trees, but no one is getting results out of unstructured, arbitrary phone call answering with actions taken by an LLM.
I'm sure there are research demos in big companies, I'm sure some AI bro has done this with the Twilio API, but no one is seriously doing this.
All it takes is one "can you take this to the post office", the simplest, of requests, and you're in a dead end of at best refusal, but more likely role-play.
Agreed that “unstructured arbitrary phone calls + arbitrary actions” is where things go to die.
What does work in production (at least for SMB/customer-support style calls) is making the problem less magical:
1) narrow domain + explicit capabilities (book/reschedule/cancel, take a message, basic FAQs)
2) strict tool whitelist + typed schemas + confirmations for side effects
3) robust out-of-scope detection + graceful handoff (“I can’t do that, but I can X/Y/Z”)
4) real logs + eval/test harnesses so regressions get caught
Once you do that, you can get genuinely useful outcomes without the role-play traps you’re describing.
We’ve been building this at eboo.ai (voice agents for businesses). If you’re curious, happy to share the guardrails/eval setup we’ve found most effective.
It's important to remember though (this is besides the point for what you're saying) that job displacement of things like secretaries from AI do not require it to be a near perfect replacement. There are many other factors (for example if it's much cheaper and can do part of the work it can dramatically shrink demand as people can shift to an imperfect replacement in AI)
I think they immediately corrected their median timelines for takeoff to 2028 upon releasing the article (I believe there was a math mistake or something initially), so all those dates can probably be bumped back a few months. Regardless, the trend seems fairly on track.
People have been in love with machines for a long time. It's just that the machines didn't talk back so we didn't grant them the "partner" status. Wait for car+LLM and you'll have a killer combo.
Only on HN will people still doubt what is happening right in front of their eyes. I understand that putting things into perspective is important, still, the type of downplaying we can see in the comments here is not only funny but also has a dangerous dimension to it. Ironically, these are the exact same people who will claim "we should have prepared better!" once the effects become more and more visible. Dear super engineers, while I feel sorry that your job and passion become a commodity right in front of you, please stay out the way.
Scott Alexander essentially provided editing and promotion for AI 2027 (and did a great job of it, I might add). Are you unaware of the actual researchers behind the forecasting/modelling work behind it, and you thought it was actually all done by a blogger? Or are you just being dismissive for fun?
