Understanding the Most Viral Chart in Artificial Intelligence

Odd Lots

Bloomberg

Business, News, News Commentary, Investing, Business News

4.5 • 2K Ratings

🗓️ 25 April 2026

⏱️ 60 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

We live in an era of charts that are going up and to the right. This image obviously describes the stock market, particularly any company whose business is adjacent to artificial intelligence. But beyond stocks, another sort of chart we keep seeing is of AI capabilities also going up and to the right. The most famous and viral of these comes from an organization called METR, which stands for Model Evaluation and Threat Research. The organization is focused on understanding the degree to which AI models can engage in autonomous, complex tasks. METR see this is as a particularly important benchmark, given the risk that AI could one day be engaged in recursive self improvement, taking humans out of the loop. But how do you really gauge a model's ability to do complex problems. And what is being measured for exactly? On this episode, we speak with METR's President Chris Painter as well as Joel Becker, a member of the technical staff who works on evaluation methods for the organization. We discuss both the mechanics and the philosophy of METR's work, and what it means when we see a a chart showing that Clause Opus 4.6 can do a task that would take a human nearly 12 hours.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Thanks for listening to All Thoughts. Follow the show on Amazon Music for more future episodes or just ask Alexa play the podcast, All Thoughts on Amazon Music.
0:12.8	Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts Radio News.
0:33.5	Hello and welcome to another episode of the Odd Lots podcast. I'm Joe Wisenthal.
0:34.6	And I'm Tracy Allaway. Tracy, one thing about AI is that lots of lines that go up.
0:40.7	Yes.
0:41.6	Famously, there is perhaps one line that has captured the attention more than others when it comes to lines going up.
0:47.9	Yes.
0:48.7	But we're recording this April 7.
0:50.4	Did you see the Anthropic Revenue chart, by the way?
0:53.3	Oh.
0:53.7	It's just like straight. Yeah, okay. It's just on the number of lines going up. I mean, there are some really. All right, let me caveat that. Okay. Up until recently, there was one chart of a line going up exponentially that became, I think it's fair to say, the most viral chart in AI, right?
1:13.0	Yes, I would absolutely agree with that.
1:18.1	So one of the many lines that go up, there are various lines that sort of capture this is essentially just measures of AI progress of what they could do, what the models are
1:22.5	capable of and so forth.
1:24.8	And there's all different benchmarks out there and hobbyist benchmark creators,
1:30.5	et cetera, all kinds of benchmarks out there.
1:33.1	Organization called Meter based out in San Francisco.
1:37.0	And they measure how well AI models are doing at various sort of engineering tasks, et cetera.
1:42.9	And they have these charts showing how long, you know, certain tasks, how long it would take
1:47.9	a human to do them, and then whether AI could do them.
1:51.3	And yes, the line's just almost vertical.
1:53.4	I think there was someone, one of the ones that came out maybe very early this year or late
	...

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