For each takeoff milestone, the team estimated the requirements and resulting overall speedup, then used those estimates to assess the time and speedup to the next milestone.

“uh then you get to superhuman level and so forth so we broke it down as these milestones you know the superhuman coder superhuman ai researcher and then super intelligent ai researcher and the way we did our forecast was we basically well for each of these milestones we were like what is it going to take to make an ai that has that achieves that milestone um and then once you do achieve that milestone how much is your overall speed up”

“And then what's it going to take to achieve the next milestone?”

“Combine that with the overall speed up and that gets you your clock time distance until that happens.”

“And then, okay, now you're at that milestone. What's your overall speed up assuming that you have that milestone.”