Historical milestone · 2025
Measuring AI ability to complete long tasks
Reviewed through September 18, 2026
2025 · Historical milestone
Measuring AI ability to complete long tasks
- Era
- 2020s
- Theme
- Reliability, uncertainty & evaluation
- Evidence form
- Empirical benchmark + trend model
- School / paradigm
- Agent evaluation / task horizons
- Institution / context
- METR
- Researchers
- Megan Kinniment; collaborators
Understand
Plain-language record, transferred from the reviewed source module.
Theory or experimental setup. Estimated the human-expert duration of software tasks that frontier agents could complete with 50 percent success and fitted a historical trend.
Result / historical claim. Made task duration a measurable axis of agent capability and reported rapid growth on the selected task distribution.
Apply
Professional implication, only where the reviewed record states one.
The checked-in record does not state a separate professional application for this entry. The topic page places it in the wider research lineage: .
Verify
Evidence status, stated limitations, and the external sources this record actually carries.
Evidence form. Empirical benchmark + trend model
Limitation / debate. The task mix was software-heavy, duration estimates were uncertain, and trend extrapolation does not prove deployment reliability.
Source status. This milestone row does not carry a primary-source URL in the approved export, and we do not have a verified link for it in our own research. We do not guess one.
No primary-source URL is recorded for this entry in our reviewed data. Rather than manufacture a citation, we link the Implement Agentic research page that carries the record.
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Cite or share
APA-like: This historical record carries a year only, and no author or publisher of record in the checked-in data. An APA reference would have to invent that metadata.
BibTeX: BibTeX requires an author and publication venue. Historical lineage entries store a narrative record and its source link, not structured authorship, so the field would be fabricated.