Ryan Greenblatt

If the company did all the same work it did last week, but had no AI assistance, how much slower would it have been?

Fraction of work done by AIs.

There are different ways to operationalize this and it's a bit confusing because humans might be spending a bunch of time gaining context so they can, for example, tell AIs what to do, and it's unclear what fraction of the work to count this as.

Things like fraction of lines written by AI would be an example of this and it seems hard to convert this number into a guess at serial labor acceleration or other notions we might care about.

A parallel labor acceleration of X is much less useful than a serial labor acceleration of X. And depending on the operationalization, the AI's doing 90% of the work is way less useful than a 10X serial labor acceleration.

So the choice of concept matters a lot for interpreting any claimed level of uplift.

This article was narrated by Type 3 Audio for Less Wrong.

It was published on April 10, 2026.

The original text contained 4 footnotes which were omitted from the narration.

Images are included in the podcast episode description.

You can think of this as a scenario forecast, but for the present, which is already uncertain, rather than the future.

I will generally state my best guess without argumentation and without explaining my level of confidence.

Some of these claims are highly speculative while others are better grounded, certainly some will be wrong.

I tried to make it clear which claims are relatively speculative by saying something like I guess, I expect, etc., but I may have missed some.

You can think of this post as more like a list of my current views rather than a structured post with a thesis, but I think it may be informative nonetheless.

In a future post, I'll go beyond the present and talk about my predictions for the future.

I was originally working on writing up some predictions, but the predictions about today ended up being extensive enough that a separate post seemed warranted.

Heading AI R&D Acceleration and Software Acceleration More Generally

Right now, AI companies are heavily integrating and deploying AI tools in their work and getting significant, but not insane, speed-ups from this.

At the start of 2026, the serial research engineering speed-up was around 1.4x, but it's now reached more like 1.6x at OpenAI and Anthropic with more capable models, better tooling,