Every time OpenAI, Google, or Anthropic introduces a new frontier large language model, the AI community holds its breath. It didn’t take a breather until METR, an AI research nonprofit whose name stands for “Model Evaluation and Threat Research,” updated a now-iconic graph that has played a prominent role in the AI discourse since it was first released in March last year.
The graph shows that some AI capabilities are evolving rapidly, and recent model releases have outperformed the already impressive trend.
This was certainly the case with Cloud Opus 4.5, the latest version of Anthropic’s most powerful model, which was released in late November. In December, METR announced that Opus 4.5 appeared to be capable of independently completing a task that would take a human about five hours — a vast improvement over even the exponential trend predicted.
But the truth is more complex than those dramatic reactions. Read the full story.
-Grace Huckins
This story is part of MIT Technology Review Explains: Our series untangles the complex, messy world of technology to help you understand what’s coming next. You can read more from the series here.
Three questions answered about next generation nuclear energy
Nuclear power continues to be one of the hottest topics in energy today, and in our recent online roundtable discussion about next-generation nuclear power, hyperscale AI data centers, and the grid, we got dozens of great questions from the audience.
