Misplaced panic about AI progress

A few days ago, METR, an AI assessment think tank, released its latest graphic, and the Twitterverse was quickly overwhelmed with panic, including a series of tweets like these (and the one above):

And

All were triggered by METR’s latest edition of their famous “time horizon” graphic:

METR@METR_Evals

We evaluated an early version of Claude Mythos Preview for risk assessment during a limited window in March 2026. We estimated a 50% time horizon of at least 16 hours (95% CI 8.5 hours to 55 hours) for our task suite, at the high end of what we can measure without new tasks.

11:41 p.m. · May 8, 2026 · 849,000 views

65 answers · 234 reposts · 2K likes

Even the normally sober forecaster Peter Wildeford feared that Mythos had “broken the graph,” meaning we could no longer measure the limits of AI capabilities:

Hold onto. Let’s take a deep breath.

(And let’s ignore the fact that “Deep Learning…”