Ed Zitron has a full breakdown of the current Huang affair scandal

I vaguely remember it being mentioned that one of the METR staff was married to a rationalist (it was either an Anthropic employee or Paul Christiano, I forgot who)

yeah essentially

the scaling laws are basically that AGI/ASI can be created by just scaling up the current LLMs

ohhhh

Pretty sure its just a fancier term for AGI (Top Expert Dominating AI)

Imo the trillion dollar question of if Huang is keeping his job is anyone’s guess right now, with all the nonsense in this administration its hard to tell what will happen. But my best guess is that while Trump can feign ignorance and try to pull strings to protect Huang, with a Democratic Congress and Senate-who are largely anti-AI-coming in January, that old trick won’t last forever. If a divorce goes through then that’ll definitely be a nail in the coffin

So I went all the way down to the appendix, and found a gem:

Appendix: Ambiguity in “80% of current acceleration is due to AI”. Claude Opus 5.5 gives the following possible interpretations of METR’s claim that “we guess that a majority (perhaps ≈80%) of the current (October 2026) acceleration is due to AI.”

Claude Opus 5.5 gives the follow possible interpretations

Did…did they just say they used Claude for this?? (Ironic, because METR also used a bunch of Claude in the source article)

Also, this is the median value. No mean value and doesn’t seem much modal value. Only one paragraph where they mention that the acceleration was only on well-specified tasks (in the section titled “How large is the (AI-attributable) acceleration in the current pace of progress, really?”)

reposting this r/BetterOffline post for further context on the METR data

The AI 2027 authors are back: Q3.5 Timelines Update: Looks Like the Intelligence Explosion Will Happen in 2027 After All

It’s all about that new METR data. Took a quick scroll and the whole thing is about forecasting and modelling. Its pretty lengthy so if anyones willing to take the plunge and read it all youll have my thanks

METR recently estimated that Anthropic is now making AI progress about twice as fast as its historical rate (they would not be surprised by anything from 1.3x to 3x), and guessed that “perhaps ≈80%” of the current acceleration is due to AI. If they’re right, that implies an AI-driven acceleration that is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario.

Going down a little bit:

A 1.7x pace of progress is 5 months ahead of the AI 2027 scenario. AI 2027 predicted 2x AI R&D uplift in Dec 2026; as argued above, this would imply a substantially lower pace of progress than the 1.7x AI-attributable pace of progress that METR’s estimates imply for Nov. So when exactly did AI 2027 predict a 1.7x pace of progress over baseline? We created this trajectory by modifying a few key parameters until it roughly matched AI 2027. In that trajectory, 1.7x acceleration over the 2024.0–2025.5 rate of progress happens in roughly April 2027. So by this metric, we are ~5 months ahead of schedule.

And a chart of their predictions to end it all off:

(Only one person above 50%?)

Mark your calendars everybody!

most of the other replies are all ‘well yeah we knew sustaining AI progress would need exponentially more resources but its like definitely worth it’

It’s just ‘well the financials don’t make any sense and these companies are not looking profitable anytime soon but like AI models are super duper good and AGI is right around the corner so you need to invest’

top quality sneer from “@1techuptopiapls” on X the fascism app:

”man proves AI improvements are not economically viable as new Anthropic model successfully cures cancer"

is the cure to cancer in the room with us right now

It’s not looking pretty for Anthropic’s IPO

I feel like Anthropic will try to bend to the dems

Isn’t it pretty bad for the scenario that the China nationalising stuff didn’t happen, since a race with China is the main fuel for the scenario’s fire? Most of the stuff they got correct this time around were no-brainers (business gurus talking about AI and the market for junior engineers being in turmoil) plus, they didn’t get the ‘people who know how to use AI are making a killing’ mostly right either

Anyways still extremely doubtful of superhuman coders in March 2027

(edit: it would actually be superhuman coders in Jan 2027 according to the tracker due to the chart saying some of Anthropic’s models are 11 weeks ahead)

Comment from r/BetterOffline:

”Anyone remember Lou Pai? He was an Enron executive got caught cheating and had to settle his divorce by giving up 50% of his shares at the peak of enron’s share price, with anthropic and openai hemorrhaging money and unable to fund their compute commits the timing of this is extremely suspicious as trump admitted he was aware of this a year ago. Now that democrats have taken control of the senate, it seems an opportune time for Jensen to cash out his shares and keep half of all the gains made through this AI bubble.”

Nvidia stock also seems to have taken a hit

we got Robo-Jesus instead

Seems entirely plausible since Trump is seemingly trying to feign ignorance/defend Huang. the White House is riddled with corruption

El-Sayed supports Bernie’s call to pause AI

so needless to say, dark times ahead for the AI industry

Update: another article on Futurism, featuring Trump and Elon attempting to defend him