Forecaster reacts: METR's bombshell paper about AI acceleration

About the author: Peter Wildeford is a top forecaster, ranked top 1% every year since 2022. Here, he shares analysis that informs his forecasts. About a month ago, METR, an AI evaluations organization, published a bombshell graph and paper that says that AI is accelerating quickly. With OpenAI’s recent launch of o3 and o4-mini, we can see if these predictions hold up. The simple version of this chart is easy to explain. Claude 3.7 could complete tasks at the end of February 2025 that would take a professional software engineer about one hour. If this trend holds up, then seven months later at the end of September 2025 we should have AI models that can do tasks that take a human two hours. And in April 2026, four-hour tasks. You can see where this goes… day-long tasks (8hrs) by November 2026 week-long tasks (40hrs) by March 2028 month-long tasks (167hrs) by June 2029 year-long tasks (2000hrs) by June 2031 o3 gives us a chance to test these projections. We can see this curve is s ... Read full article.