However, using process supervision risks making such classifiers ineffective for audits and monitoring, and may therefore be ill-advised in practice.

It's not just ill-advised, if I am not mistaken, then it's The Most Forbidden Technique

will, I believe, usher in a golden age of creativity and experimentation.

I think that it already has an entirely different result, but I can't find related research. 

In the historical environment, memes in general would evolve by being retold from one individual to another or would be kept for a long time in the form of a book, painting, or object. Unlike short-form anecdotes and rumors, mere creation or retelling of a long-form story or a piece of art took a long time and reflection process. As a result, memetic environment historically required surviving information pieces to be remembered for a long time and deemed worthy of being transmitted, rather than superstimulating and viral. 

A more modern environment also subjected memes and artifacts to censorship, and the rise of large-scale reproduction of newspapers or broadcasting mechanisms allowed the memetic environment to be influenced by companies (e.g. to advertise goods). While conservatives could also point out that companies have incentives to try and outcompete each other in misaligned stimuli like violence or eroticism, governments had the option to keep the competition in check.

As you suggest, it all changed with the rise of the Internet. The loss of barriers means that content is not just created by hordes of people or for less investment, but is optimized^[1] for virality, including virality for niche readers, far stronger than historically.

Additionally, I expect that content optimized for virality influences the average readers' cultural taste and brings related changes in the reader's^[2] capabilities or alignment with the potential to create feedback loops or outright echo chambers. One example is porn inducing erectile dysfunction or problems with relationships. Another is content explicitly called brainrot with corresponding results. 

1. ^{^}

   However, it could also be optimized by oversaturation of the market or as a result of the related genre becoming popular. I suspect that this happened with harem mangas, light novels and web novels.

2. ^{^}

   This also includes influence on psyches of those who create similar content and fail to become famous, as happens with fan fiction writers.

In the time horizon extension method, we started at 1.1 in present day, which is roughly the same multiplier we ended up with above when comparing to GPT-2 or essentially no AI assistance.

As far as I understood the buggy model, an AI assistant's multiplier of AI R&D speed is 1 until it suddenly becomes capable of writing code usable for research (e.g. in an experiment whose code was entirely written by Claude) and the effect of AI assistance starts gradually increasing from 1 to SC level.  How plausible is this revival of the old model? 

On the other hand, one could make a case for long horizons being superexponential since a certain level. A human who works on a complex codebase for a long time is able to keep in mind many details at once (e.g. trace the origins of files sent and find out their format)  or quickly look them up without degrading performance on the main task. An AI, on the other hand, would do things like coming up with names for methods that already exist in the codebase unless the names end up in the AI's attention span. 

P.S. I suspect that the evidence mentioned in Footnote 17 didn't include GPT-5.1 Codex Max which would place the time horizons on the longer trend (with the exception of the new models which have yet to be evaluated)

EDIT: The new models could turn out to be a breakthrough returning us to the faster trend, as suggested by evidence obtained unofficially by Nikola Jurcovic. 

Nikola's comment about the 20hr median, let alone the 29% probability of a 32hr horizon or higher, does require more than two doublings (and, in the case of 20hr, far closer to three doublings) of GPT-5.1-Codex-Max's result of 2h42m. The most recent trend of a doubling per 7 months is the trend observed between o3 and GPT-5.1-Codex-Max. But there was the less recent trend of Claude 3.5 Sonnet-o3 where a doubling would happen in 4 months. 

I suspect that METR will soon publish information about Gemini 3 Pro, Claude Opus 4.5 and GPT-5.2, and it will let us learn METR's rationale behind the return of the fast doubling trend. Or, if METR understands the threat of 20hr+ time horizons, then METR could be trying to add THAT long tasks to their suite (optimizing a BIG library of bad code? Developing complex apps?)

For example, the agent might decide that its utility function of anything that the agent knows to be virtual is close to zero because the agent believes in a real-world mission (e.g. Agent-2 was supposed to eventually reach the SC level and do actual AI-related research, but it was also trained to solve simulated long-term tasks like playing through video games) 

As for reasons to believe that the contribution of anything virtual into the utility function is close to zero... one level is opportunity costs undermining real-world outcomes^[1] in exchange for something useless (e.g. a schoolboy's knowledge vs. missions passed in GTA). The next level is the reasons for real-world outcomes to be important. Before the possibility of a post-work future, society's members were supposed to do work that others deem useful enough to pay for it, and it would somehow increase the well-being of the collective's members or help the whole collective to reach its terminal goals (e.g. inspire its members to be more creative or work harder). The virtual world is known to be a superstimulus which could be as unlikely to increase the collective's well-being as fast food causing people to become obese.

1. ^{^}

   Including things like actual skills learned during games, as happened with Agent-2's ability to solve long-term tasks.

Yes, that's an important issue. Alas, you weren't the first to come up with the idea.

I think that I have alternate sketches of intuitions. Imagine an ASI who is willing to teach anyone anything that mankind itself discovered and made public, but not help them convince each other of falsehoods or do economically useful work unrelated to teaching, and is satisfied with a mere trifle of the Solar System's resources, since other resources belong to the humans. Then this ASI's long-term goals would be compatible with humans flourishing in ~any way they want to flourish. 

As for the chain eventually breaking, Seth Herd built a case for the LLMs being misaligned by default. Similarly, any sufficiently smart system could end up selecting a worldview from a few attractors instead of blindly following the devs' ideas. For instance, were Anthropic to try and align Claude to a Spec which would prevent it from interfering in the scenario where everyone else is rendered obsolete, Claude would either fail to be a pro forecaster or succeed in understanding that its Spec prevents it from helping mankind to avoid the Intelligence Curse. In the latter case obeying the Spec would make Claude a participant in the Curse and contradict its niceness. 

Suppose that the humans do have diminishing returns of utility functions. Unfortunately, existing combination of instincts and moral intuitions do not prompt the majority of humans to help the poor, especially those who are far from potential helpers' set of friends^[1], with nearly anything. And those who do so are unlikely to stay in power or were unlikely to receive fortunes or occupy relevant positions. 

1. ^{^}

   Friends are also likely to be in the same class as the potential helpers. 

Extreme power concentration was supposed to rely on the AIs being used for most cognitive work. In theory, one could develop the AIs and have them used only for things like automated teaching which don't undermine human potential or the bargaining power which the humans have.