In this post, I'll go through some of my best guesses for the current situation in AI as of the start of April 2026. You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present (which is already uncertain!) rather than the future. I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence: some of these claims are highly speculative while others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong. I tried to make it clear which claims are relatively speculative by saying something like "I guess", "I expect", etc. (but I may have missed some). You can think of this post as more like a list of my current views rather than a structured post with a thesis, but I think it may be informative nonetheless. In a future post, I'll go beyond the present and talk about my predictions for the future. (I was originally working on writing up some predictions, but the "predictions" about today ended up being extensive enough that a separate post seemed warranted.) AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally) Right now, AI companies are heavily integrating and deploying [...] ---Outline:(01:07) AI R&D acceleration (and software acceleration more generally)(05:28) AI engineering capabilities and qualitative abilities(10:38) Misalignment and misalignment-related properties(15:59) Cyber(18:07) Bioweapons(18:52) Economic effects The original text contained 5 footnotes which were omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 7th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/WjaGAA4xCAXeFpyWm/my-picture-of-the-present-in-ai --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.