Not trying to discredit the premise but I do wonder how much this is from vertical scaling of model intelligence in weights vs the sheer amount of capital being thrown at training and horizontal scaling of agent swarms etc.

Anecdotally it seems like a lot of uplift continually comes from models doing more and exploring more of the search space, and we are being better at giving them embarrassingly parallel problems to Hoover up with infinite token spend.

Or maybe Anthropic got more user data to train on when they launched Fable without ZDR. That could explain large Opus 5.5 improvements.

"The industry is not prepared to handle this safely"

After the election, titles like this just irritate me. Every piece written about AI progress is:

"The machines taking jobs, flooding the internet with sludge and poisoning our online experiences, are getting better even faster! Isn't this incredible? Yeah but sorry we also think it's only riskier than ever to deploy these systems at scale. That being said, we're still going to do it, go public and take institutional money from people's retirement funds, destroy the job market, and make 3000 Anthropic employees and 500 investors really rich. There wasn't anything we could do besides write a lot of ink on it and be shocked we lost every local data center referendum."

The very same report also found that AI could not be deployed outside of a narrow domain of verifiable rewards … so take it with grains, or mountains of salt. It’s also extremely unclear how the productivity measures are calculated. They surely don’t seem to translate into economic output. Antrophic has seen its valuation corrected by 50% and possibly more… so yeah. This all sounds very fishy.

METR always says what BigAI wants to hear. They are not independent in any way.

As long as we believe, we can imagine it is true. All seeing Oracle: how do you command me? Praise his name, bringer of many miracles - he who definitely can't be manipulated from the backend to provide biased information that suites a person's malicious purpose. Ya totally.