Anthropic staff polls hit 12x uplift — and a power-law conversion lands exactly on METR's 1.61x
ben_j_todd · x · 2026-11-07
benjtodd argues Anthropic's informal internal "uplift" polls may have been well calibrated. Anthropic's Slack polls found staff averaged a 12x speedup with the latest model in October. Given Anthropic's system-card statement that 4x staff uplift implied below 2x overall progress (needing 40x for 2x), a power-law conversion exponent of 0.19 turns 12x labor uplift into 1.6x overall R&D acceleration — almost exactly the 1.61x implied by METR's 80% attribution of a 1.9x capability growth speedup to AI.
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