AIE Europe CFP and AIE World’s Fair paper submissions for CAIS peer review are due TODAY - do not delay! Last call ever.
We’re excited to welcome METR for their first LS Pod, hopefully the first of many:
METR are keepers of currently the single most infamous chart in AI:
But every Latent Space reader should be sophisticated enough to know that the details matter and that hype and hyperbole go hand in hand in AI social media, because the millions of impressions that got, by people who don’t understand or care about the nuances, disclaimers, and error bars, far outreaches the 69k views on the corrections by the people who actually made the chart:
There’s a lot of nuance both in making benchmarks (as we discovered with OpenAI on our SWE-Bench Verified podcast) and in extrapolating results from them, especially where exponentials and sigmoids are concerned. METR’s Long Horizons work itself has known biases that the authors have responsibly disclosed, but go far too underappreciated in the pursuit of doomer chart porn.
If you’re interested in a short, sharable TED talk version of this pod, over at AIE CODE we were blessed to feature Joel twice, as a stage talk and with a longer form small workshop with Q&A:
We also make sure cover some of METR’s lesser known work on Threat Evaluation but also Developer Productivity, where 2x friend of the pod and now Zyphra founder Quentin Anthony was the ONLY productive participant!
Finally, if you’re the sort to read these show notes to the end, then you definitely deserve some pictures of Joel shredding the guitar at Love Band Karaoke which we mention at the end:
Full Video Pod
Timestamps
00:00 What METR Means
00:39 Podcast Intro With Joel
01:39 ME vs TR
03:33 Time Horizon Origin Story
04:56 Picking Tasks And Biases
09:13 Time Horizon Misconceptions
11:37 Opus 4.5 And Trendlines
14:27 Productivity Studies And Explosions
29:50 Compute Slows Progress
30:47 Algorithms Need Compute
32:45 Industry Spend and Data
34:57 Clusters and Shipping Timelines
36:44 Prediction Markets for Models
38:10 Manifold Alpha Story
43:04 Beyond Benchmarks Evals
51:39 METR Roadmap and Farewell