iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 02/09/2026

METR is hiring in cyberforensics. We now embed researchers inside of AI labs to stress test monitoring, assess AI loss-of-control risk, and investigate misalignment. If you want to apply DFIR skills in frontier AI, apply (or DM). Comp range is $400k - 580k cash. jobs.lever.co/metr/b1a2f73...

jobs.lever.co

METR - Member of Technical Staff, Cyberforensics

About METR We are a nonprofit research organization that develops scientific methods to assess AI capabilities, risks, and mitigations, with a specific focus on threats related to AI R&D automation an...

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METR @metr.org · 30/07/2026

We have reached an agreement with OpenAI to conduct an independent review, with Redwood Research, of the model behavior observed during the Hugging Face incident. We will publish a blog post that describes the terms of our engagement, the scope covered, and tentative conclusions.

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METR @metr.org · 19/05/2026

Could an AI company lose control of its own agents? To find out, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and OpenAI let us (1) test their best internal models with CoT access, (2) review non-public info about capabilities, alignment, and control. The result: our first Frontier Risk Report.

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METR @metr.org · 11/05/2026

We surveyed 349 technical researchers, engineers, and managers (in February–April 2026) about how they use AI tools at work. On average, participants self-report that AI use made their work 1.6–2.1x more valuable, and that this multiplier will grow over time.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 17/04/2026

Cool profile of @metr.org’s work in the NYT today! Particularly like this from my colleague Ajeya: “METR is an organization that asks... what we think would be most valuable for the world to know about A.I. and its risks, and then the answers are what they are.” www.nytimes.com/2026/04/17/t....

nytimes.com

How Do You Measure an A.I. Boom?

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 07/03/2026

Worth reading this in full. I come in skeptical, but this basically is a claim that an AI system at Alibaba attempted autonomous replication without human intervention. This excerpt was found and highlighted by Alexander Long. Full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2512.24873

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METR @metr.org · 05/03/2026

We’re correcting a mistake in our modeling that inflated recent 50%-time horizons by 10-20% (and reduced 80%-horizons). We inappropriately penalized steepness in task-length→success curve fits. This most affects the oldest and newest models, whose fits are less data-constrained.

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METR @metr.org · 24/02/2026

Since early 2025, we've been studying how AI tools impact productivity among developers. Previously, we found a 20% slowdown. That finding is now outdated. Speedups now seem likely, but changes in developer behavior make our new results unreliable. We’re working to address this.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 21/02/2026

Our team is stretched thin at the moment! To continue upper-bounding the autonomy of AI agents, and developing evaluations for monitoring AI systems and their propensity to subvert human control, we need more great engineering and research staff. Please apply below or DM me!

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 04/02/2026

Groundhog Day is a very METR-y holiday. Small animal emerges from a cave for only a moment, shares a forecast about timelines that's somewhat difficult to interpret, and then retreats into his cave for another year.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 23/01/2026

Today we published a critique of @metr.org’s time-horizon methodology by one of the paper’s lead authors, Thomas Kwa Link: metr.org/notes/2026-0...

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 20/01/2026

I do occasionally now hear tech/finance people sincerely say that they need to focus on making more money to "escape the permanent underclass" It's important to emphasize how selfish orienting one's life around that goal is, rather than improving the median outcome for everyone

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 11/07/2025

METR a few months ago had two projects going in parallel: a project experimenting with AI researcher interviews to track degree of AI R&D acceleration/delegation, and this project. When the results started coming back from this project, we put the survey-only project on ice.

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METR @metr.org · 13/06/2025

At METR, we’ve seen increasingly sophisticated examples of “reward hacking” on our tasks: models trying to subvert or exploit the environment or scoring code to obtain a higher score. In a new post, we discuss this phenomenon and share some especially crafty instances we’ve seen.

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Emily Liu @emilyliu.me · 30/05/2025

personal update: today is my last day with the Bluesky team! this is bittersweet news to share, but the great thing about an open network is you never really have to leave. I’ll be rooting for Bluesky and atproto from the outside 🫡💙

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 09/04/2025

I spent a few days at Yale Law, while also listening to Sam Harris’s interview with Tom Holland about his book “Dominion”, and it’s striking how similar the role and vibe of the American judiciary is to a kind of secular priesthood. Robes, scholars interpreting sacred texts

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METR @metr.org · 19/03/2025

When will AI systems be able to carry out long projects independently? In new research, we find a kind of “Moore’s Law for AI agents”: the length of tasks that AIs can do is doubling about every 7 months.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 10/03/2025

Bought a new bike this weekend :(

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 11/02/2025

Taking science fiction seriously - thinking with effort about which ideas from sci-fi could become real soon and why and which couldn’t - has been so useful to me that it feels something like a core value

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Cleaning a childhood bedroom and I’m struck by how much optimistic messaging about technology and space technology in particular I was surrounded by as a kid in the 90’s. Are kids still immersed in this stuff? I hope so

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 29/12/2024

Sadly most physical goods that you’d be tempted to donate to someone are worth less than the cost in effort it would take to find someone who needs them

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

If this group is dedicated to advocating for what it seems like they’re dedicated to advocating for, it’s pretty wild that they exist!

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

Worlds with federal pre-emption of AI policy might be correlated with worlds with a huge expansion of social attention to AI (e.g. acute labor displacement), and a less "technocratic" reaction. Will the first big federal AI bill feel more like the CARES Act or the CHIPS Act?

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 23/12/2024

I think AI would benefit from more social contact with scientists in fields whose questions don't have intuitively verifiable answers. To assess model capability, I find myself often relying on happenstance anecdotes I hear from e.g. lab-bench researchers months after the fact.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 22/12/2024

Will human-level AI be self-deploying/"productizing", or not? Will the "the product can explain to you how to use it and apply it" dynamic dramatically increase the adoption of AI relative to historical comparisons like AVs and steam engines?

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

A corollary to this: I think many policy initiatives would benefit from having more deeply engaged and informed opponents, and this is a neglected niche in many areas/topics. Detailed proposals having better (in the sense of more substantive) opponents is good for the world

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I think the world could always benefit from more good-faith really in-depth critique of effortful technical/intellectual work. Many organizations that I collaborate with publish work hoping to have their ideas improved upon or attacked, but often surprisingly few people engage.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 10/12/2024

I’ve been wondering, has the (bad) reaction to this actually been that unusual?

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 09/12/2024

Luigi Mangione's review of the Unabomber manifesto on Goodreads

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 08/12/2024

Uber Eats is truly an embarrassment of riches. We are living in a golden age of delivered food.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

Just realized: I remember when “memes” were new! So strange

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 05/12/2024

“booster” “streaming” “bitcoin” “search engine” “self-driving car” “autonomous replication” “covid” “humanoid robots” “datacenter” “disinformation campaign” “drone warfare” “Oculus” “AI boyfriend/girlfriend” “lab-grown meat”

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 02/12/2024

The world we live in today is already incredibly Cyberpunk, by comparison with the world of the 90s and early 2000s that I grew up in

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Erik Brynjolfsson @erikbryn.bsky.social · 01/12/2024

Here's a great starter pack of economists working on AI. Who else should be on this list? bsky.app/starter-pack...

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Epoch AI @epochai.bsky.social · 27/11/2024

We've just launched our AI Benchmarking Hub! This is a new platform for rigorous, independent evaluations of AI model capabilities, featuring interactive visualizations and in-depth analysis. (1/8) epoch.ai/blog/introdu...

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

If you run a software company, make sure to ship something today, so that people get impressed that you’re ignoring the holiday

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 28/11/2024

Is the current Bitcoin rally dumb or warranted?

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

This thread makes me feel like the most parsimonious way to view the last 20 years is that there just *was no* National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It basically didn’t exist, we just didn’t realize it yet. Its mission was lying on the ground and SpaceX picked it up x.com/CJHandmer/st...

x.com

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 26/11/2024

FOLKS! I continue to update and maintain what is the best (the best!) AI Starter Pack by a country mile (and it's getting better all the time!)

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METR @metr.org · 25/11/2024

How close are current AI agents to automating AI research itself? Our new ML research engineering benchmark (RE-Bench) addresses this question by directly comparing frontier models such as Claude 3.5 Sonnet and o1-preview with 50+ human experts on 7 challenging research engineering tasks.

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METR @metr.org · 25/11/2024

Testing, testing

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Emily Liu @emilyliu.me · 24/11/2024

While Bluesky looks like other social apps on the surface, it’s actually quite different. It’s an open network. I blogged about it here:

emilyliu.me

Benefits of an open network

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 23/11/2024

When I’m on time for a meeting I think that being on time is an important way to show respect, and respect the time of others. 😇 When I’m late to a meeting, I know that everyone is late sometimes and others don’t mind waiting if you give them a heads up. 😇

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Everything I do is dedicated to him

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 22/11/2024

Somehow this never occurred to me: If transformers can learn human language self-supervised, this means that with enough data they can also learn whale, bird, dolphin, in a way that is coherent to those animals.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 21/11/2024

I suspect that there is a “ChatGPT-moment” lying on the ground for the first group to put together a really compelling demo of a frontier model piloting a humanoid robot. I don’t feel quite like we’ve seen this yet.

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Chris Painter @chris.bsky.social · 20/11/2024

Text I just sent: "Are you following the Cocomelon soundtrack discourse?"

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