AI R&D uplift

How much AI tools speed up the people doing AI research today.

Facts

Lane: Models and thresholds
Wave: 8 of 12 (build order, not a date)
Needs: 16 boxes all the way back through hard links
Unlocks: 8 boxes downstream through hard links
Leverage: 1.0 points · stands in the way of 6 of 53 stages · rank 10 of 57
Cluster: Oversight and alignment

Evidence as of October 2026

AI Futures puts 2026 uplift between 1.04 and 1.2x (METR’s estimate) and about 2x (Daniel Kokotajlo’s), well short of the 25x a superhuman AI researcher implies.

Watch
Speed-up of AI research from AI tools: 1.04 to 1.2x (METR) to about 2x (Kokotajlo) in 2026.

Around it

Needs · 3

Coding agents as productsstage · Built today
Long-horizon agentsstage · Built today
Compute supplycapability · Built today

Unlocks · 2

Superhuman AI researcherstage · Speculative
Internal deployment oversightcapability · Emerging

Loops and off-ramps

AI research automationreinforcing loop
Capex pullbackoff-ramp · cut off
Taiwan chip disruptionoff-ramp · cut off
Power shortfalloff-ramp · cut off
Capability plateauoff-ramp · cut off
Training data ruled outoff-ramp · slowed

Openings researchers' judgement, October 2026 scouting

Startup room 55/100 · rank 21 of 124 Research room 85/100 · rank 2 of 124

Crowding2 Lab overlap4 Small-team fit3 Buyer today3 Research openness5

Depth: deep
Players: METR; AI Futures Project; Epoch AI; P-Zero Research; Mercor ($10bn); Weco AI ($8m seed)
Wedge: A neutral third party that labs trust to measure internal, research-level and organisation-level uplift, closing the ~40pp self-report vs RCT gap. research