When they can perform a task, AIs are much cheaper than humans

AI systems are increasingly capable of substantial work. I'm old enough to remember 2025, when METR's time-horizon graph climbed from seven-minute tasks at 80% reliability at the start of the year to tasks taking more than an hour by the end. The time horizons for Astra and Fable 5.1 are now so long that METR's current task suite cannot reliably estimate them. But the recent Hugging Face attack and a slew of mathematics results show that frontier systems are now capable of some tasks that would ...