Techxplore: Crashing waves vs. rising tides: Overturning prior views about how AI could overtake human workers

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has said that AI could surpass "almost all humans at almost everything" shortly after 2027. While AI's capabilities are certainly improving, such rapid progress might seem at odds with findings that show AI is still failing at 95%+ of remote freelance projects, and continues to struggle with hallucination, long term planning, and forms of abstract reasoning that humans find easy. But recent work from METR has found evidence that LLMs can gain capabilities in rapid surges—jumping from succeeding almost never to almost always in just a few years. If this is true across the economy, it could mean that workers could be blindsided by AI advances.

In their study, MIT researchers characterize these out-of-nowhere capability gains as crashing waves and ask if they are likely to be an economy-wide phenomenon or whether advances in AI come as a rising tide. Across thousands of real world tasks, the team finds that, while indeed AI capabilities are improving quickly, AI capabilities are rising more smoothly, suggesting that crashing waves are the exception, not the rule.

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