Forecasting study finds leading AI experts badly underestimated how fast the field would move

An interim report from the Forecasting Research Institute (FRI) finds that senior specialists significantly underestimated recent AI progress on benchmarks and on some adoption measures. FRI has collected forecasts on AI progress since mid-2022. The first round of its Longitudinal Expert AI Panel (LEAP) drew 339 experts: 76 computer scientists, 76 industry experts, 68 economists and 119 AI policy specialists. The computer scientists included 30 professors at top-20 institutions and 10 of the 200 most-cited AI authors. The panels also included superforecasters, generalists with proven records of accurate prediction. The widest gap was in mathematics. AI reached gold-medal level at the International Mathematical Olympiad in July 2025. That was five years earlier than the median expert forecast and ten years earlier than the median superforecaster forecast. Those forecasts were gathered in 2022, before ChatGPT launched, but the report says the pattern held afterward. The findings matter because governments and companies rely on expert judgment to time AI regulation and investment. The report is interim, and the excerpt does not show its full set of metrics or where forecasters came closest.