random thought about anthropic's RSI post^[1]:

in the graphs they show, mythos looks like a step change -- its introduction dwarfs everything else on the y-axes.

the interpretation that anthropic wants the reader to make is like: "the y-axes are a proxy for d(capabilities)/dt. code is written faster -> claudes get developed faster -> coding is even faster -> etc."

however, the y-axes are also a measure of capabilities itself. (hence, under anthropic's interpretation, dC/dt ~ C and C grows exponentially.) and i would bet that mythos is a much larger-scale model in terms of training compute, and that that is why it is so much more capable.

but the bottleneck on training compute is not code-writing or research; these things are necessary complements to increased compute capacity, needed to leverage the increased capacity effectively, but it's still true that the data centers come online at their own pace and writing 10x more LoC won't make them come any faster.

so a contrarian interpretation would be: "these plots show that to a first order approximation, training compute is all that matters for capabilities (or at least for the proxies on the y-axes), and automating coding/research with claude code does not magically give you more compute, so this extra coding/research velocity is not meaningfully 'building claude faster.' and that's why the y-axes show a step change between two plateaus rather than a clean exponential trend -- the quantities plotted on the y-axes did not feed back into the dynamics, we're just seeing a larger-scale model arrive exogenously and cause a step change (which only looks somewhat smooth because it takes a finite time to learn how to use it fully and because the moving averages in the "session success rate" plot have an inherent smoothing effect)"

1. ^{^}

   copied from a message i sent in a messaging app, hence the lowercase and abbreviated style