Question: When will transformative AI be created?
Answer: As is often said, it's difficult to make predictions, especially about the future. This has not stopped many people thinking about when AI will transform the world, but all predictions should come with a warning that it's a hard domain to find anything like certainty.
［https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/KrJfoZzpSDpnrv9va/draft-report-on-ai-timelines This report］ for the Open Philanthropy Project is perhaps the most careful attempt so far (and generates ［https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1TjNQyVHvHlC-sZbcA7CRKcCp0NxV6MkkqBvL408xrJw/edit#gid꞊505210495 these graphs］, which peak at 2042), and there's been much discussion including ［https://www.alignmentforum.org/posts/rzqACeBGycZtqCfaX/fun-with-12-ooms-of-compute this reply and analysis］ which argues that we likely need less compute than the OpenPhil report expects.
There have also been ［https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/06/08/ssc-journal-club-ai-timelines/ expert surveys］, and many people have ［https://www.lesswrong.com/tag/ai-timelines shared various thoughts］. Berkeley AI professor ［https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuart_J._Russell Stuart Russell］ has given his best guess as “sometime in our children’s lifetimes”, and ［https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ray_Kurzweil Ray Kurzweil］ (Futurist and Google’s director of engineering) predicts ［https://futurism.com/kurzweil-claims-that-the-singularity-will-happen-by-2045 human level AI by 2029 and the singularity by 2045］. The ［https://www.metaculus.com/questions/3479/when-will-the-first-artificial-general-intelligence-system-be-devised-tested-and-publicly-known-of/ Metaculus question on publicly known AGI］ has a median of around 2029 (around 10 years sooner than it was before the GPT-3 AI showed ［https://gpt3examples.com/ unexpected ability on a broad range of tasks］).
The consensus answer, if there was one, might be something like: “highly uncertain, maybe not for over a hundred years, maybe in less than 15, with around the middle of the century looking fairly plausible”.