HAI Seminar The AI 100

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AI Goes Mainstream: The Scaling Era and the Rise of Generative AI

Michael Wooldridge, Ashall Professor of the Foundations of Artificial Intelligence, University of Oxford

Moderated by: Russ Altman, Kenneth Fong Professor and Professor of Bioengineering, of Genetics, of Medicine, of Biomedical Data Science, Senior Fellow at the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI and Professor, by courtesy, of Computer Science

This talk will cover key insights from the third AI100 report, AI Goes Mainstream: The Scaling Era and the Rise of Generative AI, set for release in October 2026. The report was commissioned by the AI100 standing committee and led by study panel chair Michael Wooldridge.

Wooldridge will discuss how generative AI achieved World Wide Web-level impact in five years, largely unanticipated even by its developers; why software engineering became AI's first killer app and what that suggests for knowledge work; the unprecedented scale of AI infrastructure investment and the strains it creates; and the shift away from pure scaling toward reasoning and inference-time compute. He will also cover the concentration of frontier development among a small number of US and Chinese actors, expert disagreement over AGI timelines, and a governance landscape that remains fragmented.

The One Hundred Year Study on Artificial Intelligence (AI100) is a longitudinal effort administered out of Stanford HAI and managed by a standing committee of AI experts from around the world, chaired by Sheila McIlraith, Professor of Computer Science at the University of Toronto. Its mission is to assess AI not as a snapshot, but as an evolving force across technical, ethical, economic, and societal domains. Every five years, we return to the same standing questions and answer them anew in a changed world.