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Just a few months ago people were still talking about exponential progress. The fact that we’re already going for just linear progress is not a good sign

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https://metr.org/blog/2025-03-19-measuring-ai-ability-to-com...

We are still at 7mo doubling time on METR task duration. If anything the rate is increasing if you bias to more recent measurements.

Linear growth on a 0-100 benchmark is quite likely an exponential increase in capability.

Except it is sublinear. Sonnet 4 was 10.2% above sonnet 3.7 after 3 months.

We should all know that in the software world, the last 10% requires 90% of the effort!

Sublinear as demonstrated on a sigmoid scale is quite fast enough for me thank you.

This got me thinking - is there any reasonable metric we could use to measure the intellectual capabilities of the most capable species on Earth that had evolved at each point in time? I wonder what kind of growth function we'd see.

Silly idea - is there an inter-species game that we could use in order to measure ELO?

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