METR’s 14h 50% Horizon Impacts The Economy More Than ASI Timelines

• AI News Team
• February 21, 2026

​Published on February 20, 2026 9:08 PM GMTAnother day, another METR graph update.METR said on X:We estimate that Claude Opus 4.6 has a 50%-time-horizon of around 14.5 hours (95% CI of 6 hrs to 98 hrs) on software tasks. While this is the highest point estimate we’ve reported, this measurement is extremely noisy because our current task suite is nearly saturated.Some people are saying this makes superexponential progress more likely.Forecaster Peter Wildeford predicts 2-3.5 workweek time horizons by end of year which would have “significant implications for the economy”.Even Ajeya Cotra (who works at METR) is now saying that her predictions from last month are too conservative and 3-4 month doubling time with superexponential progress is more likely.Should We All Freak Out?People are especially concerned when looking at the linear graph for the 50% horizon, which looks like this:I claim that although this is a faster trend than before for the 50% horizon, there are at least two reasons to take these results with a grain of salt:As METR keeps saying  they’re at near saturation of their task suite, which as David Rein mentions, means they could have measured an horizon of 8h or 20h depending on how they ran their evaluations.After some discussion on one of my previous post regarding Opus 4.5, and talking more with AI 2027 folks, my understanding is that the thing that actually matters (for AI 2027-type timeline analysis) is reliably automating coding. And right now the 80% horizon is still on trend.Why 80% horizon and not 50%? Won’t 50% still accelerate the economy and research?Well, I don’t know. I wish I had a better answer here that “I’ve spent 30 minutes talking to someone who seems to have thought way more about timelines than me and it seems that the thing they really care about is reliably automating coding”.My current model for the AI 2027 -> AI 2030 update goes something like “research taste is hard to bootstrap” and “actually it will take 4 years to get to super long (think years) 80% horizons”.Why Super Long 80% Horizons Though? Isn’t 50% Enough?Again, I wish I had a better answer here. Maybe read that update. And all the supplementary materials.My understanding is that the main crux in the model is something called “Coding time horizon required to achieve Automated Coder”, which you can play with at aifuturesmodel.com.Right now it says “3.3 work years”. That’s because for some people, to really get an Automated Coder you need an AI working completely autonomously for like 125 years (~human max lifespan). For other people it’s like months, or like 1 year.For instance, if I change it to one month, I get automated coder by August 2028.Why does Automated Coder Matter So Much? What about the economy? Vibe researching / Coding?Those are all valid questions. My guess is that AI 2027 people would say like “not fully automating coding would give you some uplift but not the crazy uplift that completely automating coding would give you”.Something something unless you fully automate coding then you’ll still be bottlenecked by human research taste and compute question mark? @elifland @Daniel KokotajloDiscuss ​Read More