Anthropic's system card for Mythos Preview says:

It's unclear how we should interpret this. What do they mean by productivity uplift? To what extent is Anthropic's institutional view that the uplift is 4x? (Like, what do they mean by "We take this seriously and it is consistent with our own internal experience of the model.")

Edit: Anthropic has released more information about this survey and their interpretation in the Opus 4.7 system card. I appreciate that they did this! I discuss this new information here.

One straightforward interpretation is: AI systems improve the productivity of Anthropic so much that Anthropic would be indifferent between the current situation and a situation where all of their technical employees magically work 4 hours for every 1 hour (at equal productivity without burnout) but they get zero AI assistance. In other words, AI assistance is as useful as having their employees operate at 4x faster speeds for all activities (meetings, coding, thinking, writing, etc.) I'll call this "4x serial labor acceleration" ^[1] (see here for more discussion of this idea ^[2] ).

I currently think it's very unlikely that Anthropic's AIs are yielding 4x serial labor acceleration, but if I did come to believe it was true, I would update towards radically shorter timelines. (I tentatively think my median to Automated Coder would go from 4 years from now to maybe 1.3 years from now; my median to AI R&D parity would go from 5 years from now to maybe 2.5 years from now.) My best guess is that 4x serial labor acceleration would cause AI progress to go 1.75x faster (see "Appendix: Estimating AI progress speed up from serial labor acceleration") which is very large and close to the 2x "dramatic acceleration" threshold Anthropic is using for "Autonomy threat model 2: risks from automated R&D". ^[3]

My current best (low confidence, low precision) guess for the serial labor acceleration is ~1.55x (with a higher serial labor acceleration of ~1.75x for just research engineering activities). I currently think that reasonably informed Anthropic employees that have thought about this topic in a decent amount of detail think the serial labor acceleration is closer to 1.5x than 4x.

I think uplift metrics like "serial labor acceleration" at AI companies are some of the most relevant metrics to track when trying to figure out how close w...

Giac Biglioli

Giac Biglioli