
"Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models" by Anders Cairns Woodruff, Francis Rhys Ward, Dewi Gould, Rauno Arike, Jason R Brown, Jo Jiao, wlanderson, ariana_azarbal, harrymayne, Patrick Leask
From LessWrong (Curated & Popular) by LessWrong
June 11, 2026 · 10 min
About this episode
The episode discusses the implications of frontier AI models completing tasks without chain of thought and its relevance to safety.
(see full author list at the end) PAPER LINK About a year ago, METR showed that the length of tasks frontier models can reliably complete doubles every few months. A related safety-relevant question is this: what length of tasks can models complete without any chain of thought (CoT)? If models can do extensive reasoning without outputting any CoT, it would have implications for safety. Developers and deployment-time monitors couldn’t easily understand models’ motivations and catch dang...
People in this episode
Guests: Anders Cairns Woodruff, Francis Rhys Ward, Dewi Gould, Rauno Arike, Jason R Brown, Jo Jiao, wlanderson, ariana_azarbal, harrymayne, Patrick Leask
Topics covered
- AI safety
- task completion
- frontier models
- chain of thought
- reasoning
- deployment monitoring
Keywords
- AI models
- task length
- safety implications
- reasoning without CoT
- deployment-time monitoring
Mentioned in this episode
Organizations: METR
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