Will AI start developing its own successors soon?
What's the story
Artificial intelligence (AI) is on the verge of a major breakthrough. A recent article on Import AI argues that by the end of 2028, we may witness "no-human-involved AI R&D," an advanced AI system capable of independently designing and developing its own successors. The author Jack Clark believes there is over a 60% chance that this will happen.
Coding advancements
AI's coding revolution
The article highlights how AI systems have revolutionized coding and software engineering. For instance, SWE-Bench, a widely used coding test, shows the progress of AI in solving real-world GitHub issues. Claude Mythos Preview scored 93.9% on SWE-Bench, effectively saturating the benchmark, while its predecessor Claude 2 only managed around 2%. This shows how far we've come with AI's ability to write complicated code independently of human oversight.
Independence
Insights on AI's growing independence
Clark also discusses METR, which measures how long it takes for AI systems to complete tasks that would take humans a long time. The results are striking: OpenAI's GPT-3.5 could do tasks taking ~30 seconds in 2022, while Claude Opus 4.6 can now handle tasks taking ~12 hours in 2026. This shows how much more independent AI systems are getting.
Research automation
Core science skills and R&D automation
AI is also getting good at core science skills essential to R&D. CORE-Bench, a benchmark for reproducing research results from papers, shows dramatic progress with Opus 4.5 scoring 95.5% on its hardest tasks. MLE-Bench tests how well AI systems can compete in Kaggle competitions and has seen top-scoring systems like Gemini3 score 64.4%.
Economic shift
Impacts on productivity and economy
The article concludes by discussing how these advancements could lead to massive productivity increases across various sectors. It also touches on potential economic shifts such as "Amdahl's Law" which states that as more resources are added to a task, the returns diminish, and how this might affect our economy. The implications of these changes are profound and under-discussed in popular media coverage.