Theses on AI
1The horizon problem AI is already good at automating quick tasks: ones where it gets feedback fast and doesn't lose track of what it's doing. METR tracks this: the length of task an AI agent can reliably finish has been doubling roughly every four months through 2025. But even METR says they can't reliably measure anything past 16 hours yet.
- ▪1The horizon problem AI is already good at automating quick tasks: ones where it gets feedback fast and doesn't lose track of what it's doing.
- ▪METR tracks this: the length of task an AI agent can reliably finish has been doubling roughly every four months through 2025.
- ▪But even METR says they can't reliably measure anything past 16 hours yet.
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Story provenance
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Record
| Original publisher | Smunshi |
| Canonical URL | https://smunshi.net/posts/ai-theses.html |
| Publication time | Wed, 12 Aug 2026 19:09:54 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-08-12T19:26:33.644Z |
| Last seen | 2026-08-12T19:26:33.644Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | None |
| Cluster logic | Not yet clustered, or no peer story found in the clustering window. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
1The horizon problem AI is already good at automating quick tasks: ones where it gets feedback fast and doesn't lose track of what it's doing. METR tracks this: the length of task an AI agent can reliably finish has been doubling roughly every four months through 2025. But even METR says they can't reliably measure anything past 16 hours yet. Nobody actually has good data on long tasks. The real problem with long tasks is what researchers call the credit assignment problem: it's hard for the AI to figure out which of its earlier actions caused something to go right or wrong, especially when feedback is rare. Step count isn't the real limit either.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Smunshi.
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