Have We Seen an Acceleration in Discoveries?

Notes are unpolished research updates directly from METR researchers, and have gone through less review than our research posts. They do not necessarily reflect the views of METR as a whole. Discovery of cyber vulnerabilities has accelerated sharply. Discovery of math results has accelerated somewhat. However this is harder to objectively measure. Discovery of optimizations has not shown a dramatic acceleration. These conclusions are based only on public discoveries. It is quite plausible that AI labs are making discoveries internally that they are not disclosing. We use the word “discovery” to refer to any advance in the state of public knowledge, including new inventions or rewriting algorithms to be more efficient. Monitoring aggregate discoveries is useful because it reflects real-world utility. Additionally aggregate discoveries can reflect either AI automation or augmentation. It is notable that databases tracking exploited vulnerabilities (CISA and Vulncheck KEVs) show significantly lower year-over-year growth than the databases of known vulnerabilities. A crude metric is the rate of solving open problems from pre-existing lists: Hilbert, Millennium, Smale, The Open Problems Project, and Ben Green’s 100 open problems. Three problems from these lists were solved with AI in 2026: the Jacobian conjecture from Smale’s list, Problem 44 from…