The Vertical Takeoff In AI Is Here, And METR Has The Stats To Prove It. #artificialintelligence

If you've been keeping up with the AI news in 2026, then you know something feels just a little bit different, like we're hitting vertical take off. And we're starting to see the data to prove it. Some of the most interesting benchmarks in AI are the ones tracked by a company called METR. METR attempt to measure how many human hours of typical digital work can be completed autonomously by AI models. When GPT 3 was released, this was less than 10 seconds. Two years later this was up to 36 seconds. It had been reliably doubling every 7 months. With the release of Opus 4.5 in November last year this had shot up to over 5 hours. And now, just 3 months later, Opus 4.6 has recorded a time of more than 14 hours. If you didn't realise it yet, Opus 4.6 broke the exponential curves and launched us into a different world.