Estimate 2029 as the latest a softmod will release
As we know, LLMs are getting increasingly good at complicated things with a computer. All the cybersecurity things with Claude Mythos and gpt 5.5 cyber show companies might be taking it more seriously. But this also means in a year or two when there's cheap and effective coders, the switch 2 (I leave mine offline on the base firmware) will eventually be hackable. Theoretically you could make progress today but it wouldn't be fast or likely.
I'd estimate the chances of coders doing this to increase per year.
10% 2026 (they're good, but not cheap yet)
30% 2027
75% 2028
If the normal rate of 250x cheaper per year with the same abilities continues as it has been for the past 3 or so then there's no question about it. Patches are released so this isn't a big issue for the real world but an isolated system has no chance it'll hold out.
1 year ago, GPT o3 scores 15/100 in agentic tasks (artificialanalysis)
Today, Gemini 3.5 flash is ~3-4x faster, scores 58/100, and ~1.5x the cost to complete the benchmark.
A year before that, I believe the best model was Claude 3.5 sonnet which could hardly string together a tool call.
The future looks bright. I don't see any flaws in this prediction, but other checking it would be appreciated.