Opening article
Import AI 458: Reckoning with the future; and a singularity story
To understand why I’m thinking about success so much, let’s look at a graph that tries to represent all of AI progress, the Epoch Capabilities Index, or ECI . These are all achievements in their own right, but they stem from a common underlying technology, and that common underlying technology is continually being pushed forward. Let’s talk through some of this by returning to the graph we looked at before, but this time by looking at it through the lens of my own usage of the technology. How the graph feels to me Another way of viewing this graph is how it has felt to me in terms of my own subjective experience of working with the technology.
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To understand why I’m thinking about success so much, let’s look at a graph that tries to represent all of AI progress, the Epoch Capabilities Index, or ECI .
The ECI shows the score of different models over time on a basket of 40+ distinct benchmarks. When you look at the graph you see a bunch of lines going up. When I look at the graph, I feel a sense of vertigo, because I know a little bit about what underlies this graph. So let’s find a different way to view the graph: by looking at the achievements of various AI systems over time.
I then proceeded to summarize some of the highlights of AI progress in the last few years, starting in March 2023 with AI passing the bar exam tested, how LLM-based systems achieved silver medal in the International Math Olympiad (July 2024) then gold (July 2025), to AI co-authoring new mathematical proofs (2025), and systems like Claude Mythos coming out and finding novel flaws in software. This gives you a sense of the rapidity of AI progress, but what I want you to feel is the future implied by it. These are all achievements in their own right, but they stem from a common underlying technology, and that common underlying technology is continually being pushed forward.
Strategic Perspective & Ecosystem Impact
We have just talked about the individual ‘trees’ of AI success, but these trees are all part of a forest, and this forest is growing in size and breadth with every passing moment: `in fact, the growth rate of the whole forest is increasing over time.
SUCCESS AND WHAT IT MEANS This talk rests on the idea that the sort of progress we’ve just seen will continue. And why wouldn’t it? It is based on a common technology where performance keeps growing somewhat predictably in direct relation to the resources invested in it, namely compute and data. And we know that companies are now investing hundreds of billions of dollars in the computing facilities to train future AI systems, so some amount of future progress is already locked in.
That means we need to be eyes wide open about what the continued success of this technology means, so let me be very clear:
Why it matters
Welcome to Import AI, a newsletter about AI research Reported by Import AI on May 26, 2026.
Topic dossiers Anthropic & Claude