"We make a tentative calibration of the self-sustaining ac celeration condition using the existing data that is available, measuring AI capabilities using the Epoch Capabilities Index (Ho et al., 2025).

We find that the condition is met if a one-unit increase in AI model capabilities results in at least 15% higher AI R&D pro ductivity.

A rough back-of-the-envelope calculation based on reported AI engineer uplift suggests this return has been around 9% since the launch of coding agents.

This number is below the model-implied threshold, suggesting we are not experiencing a self-sustaining acceleration."

And the source of this data seems to be self-reported productivity gains from surveys: 1.4–2X in METR’s survey of technical workers (Becker, 2026).

A bit flimsy basis but an interesting paper nonetheless.