METR

node · earth

The non-profit research organisation, based in the United States, whose distinctive contribution has been to measure what models do in conditions closer to work than to examinations. Two of its outputs are load-bearing here. In July 2025 it published a randomised controlled trial in which sixteen experienced open-source developers completed 246 real issues in repositories they knew well, and were 19% slower with early-2025 AI assistance than without while believing they had been about 20% faster — a result METR itself has since flagged as historical, describing tools and workflows that have changed. Separately it publishes a task time-horizon metric: the length of task, measured by how long skilled humans take, that a model completes autonomously with 50% reliability, reported as doubling roughly every seven months over 2019–2025 with a faster doubling in the most recent period. The metric is the interesting object, not the extrapolation from it: it converts an unbounded question about capability into a quantity with a unit and a stated reliability threshold.

A node is not a place. Drawing it on a map would assert something about the world that no stored fact supports.