Some days it can seem as if the whole of the tech world is hanging on the latest update to one graph.
The graph in question is made by a non-profit research institute called METR and it assesses the software development capacities of different AI models.
For many months now, this chart has been provoking excitement and unease in anyone who watches artificial intelligence because it shows a striking exponential trend – that is, a doubling in growth.
According to METR, AI is getting twice as good at the startling rate of roughly every seven months.
The latest results turned the dial from feverish to panicked, because it showed the trend not just continuing, but actually speeding up.
METR tests AIs by assessing their ability to complete longer and longer human software tasks.
The latest model it analysed, Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6, broke all previous records.
Many in tech compare the situation to the COVID pandemic because of the deceptive way doubling turns from apparently small increases to monstrous leaps.
“Nothing, nothing, nothing, everything,” was how a UK tech entrepreneur and AI researcher described the situation to me a few months ago, at a time when the METR chart was already looking fairly vertiginous (although, in retrospect, it feels as if we were barely approaching the foothills).
The progress since then makes many feel like we are rapidly approaching “everything”.
After the chart’s release, one METR researcher sent a note to his old college friends, which he posted on social media, saying: “I feel very confident now that it’s going to be totally insane and chaotic, like many orders of magnitude more chaotic than anything the world has experienced in our lifetimes.”
This isn’t even an unusual sentiment in tech right now. The chief executives of leading AI companies make similar statements all the time.
Even Demis Hassabis, the most measured of the AI leaders, regularly says that AI will have 10 times the impact of the Industrial…
