"Where is all the AI safety research uplift?" by Buck cover art

"Where is all the AI safety research uplift?" by Buck

"Where is all the AI safety research uplift?" by Buck

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Summary
 METR recently released a report estimating that Anthropic is getting an overall 1.7x acceleration in AI capability progress as a result of AI accelerating their work. As many have noted (see e.g. Ajeya's post), this 1.7x acceleration implies that research is being sped up by much more than 1.7x; Ajeya speculates 10x (which is similar to the ~12x uplift estimated by Anthropic staff). That is, this result implies that researchers are producing about 10 times as many quality-adjusted results as they would without AI progress, or as they were a year or two ago.

Anthropic researchers estimated that Mythos 5 caused 5x uplift, and we have access to Opus 5.5, which is somewhat better. (I didn’t take their estimate that seriously at the time, because it was quite unclear how the estimate was produced and it seemed very surprising (see Ryan's discussion at the time), but I’m taking it more seriously now as a result of it being consistent with the METR report).

If this is the case, then AIs speed up AI safety research as much as AI capabilities research, we might expect Anthropic safety researchers to be working 10 times faster, and external safety researchers to be [...]

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First published:
November 9th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/wPrpnfaNL5JP9i6KT/where-is-all-the-ai-safety-research-uplift

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.
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