Is AI Accelerating?

Ben Todd argues AI capability gains are still compounding — even if recent model releases feel incremental, the overall curve hasn’t slowed.

#1) Benchmarks

Claude 4.6 and Mythos are roughly on trend across 37 post-2024 benchmarks. But Mythos represents 6 months of progress while only scoring +2 on Anthropic’s internal ECI, which likely emphasizes agentic coding — the area most relevant to an intelligence explosion.

#2) Revenue

Revenue growth has accelerated over the last 3 years, driven largely by Anthropic growing faster than OpenAI. This may be the hardest benchmark to game since it reflects real customer spending.

#3) Productivity uplift

Anthropic says Claude 4.6 made researchers 2× more productive, and Mythos 4×. The true gains are probably lower — maybe ~1.2× and ~1.6× — but still enough to modestly accelerate AI progress.

#4) Compute demand

AI chip rental prices had been falling ~30% annually as hardware improved. But over the last few months, prices have risen ~30%. That suggests demand for compute is outpacing supply, consistent with rapidly increasing capabilities and faster scaling.

Sources: blog post, tweet