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LS Liron Shapira Liron Shapira Host of Doom Debates, the #1 show for high-stakes debate about AI extinction risk.

“Twice as productive compared to a year ago. The neutrons are really starting to hit here. This is recursive self-improvement: will AI help build AI? And this 2X is net of Amdahl's law. Some parts are still slow, but once everything nets out, they're still going twice as fast, meaning the AI part is probably more like 10 times faster, but there are other bottlenecks.”

Doom Debates! · AI Research & Frontier Labs · November 2026

“Twice as productive compared to a year ago. The neutrons are really starting to hit here. This is recursive self-improvement: will AI help build AI? And this 2X is net of Amdahl's law. Some parts are still slow, but once everything nets out, they're still going twice as fast, meaning the AI part is probably more like 10 times faster, but there are other bottlenecks.” — Liron Shapira, Doom Debates!

Context

Liron Shapira is explaining the METR report that AI is roughly doubling the speed of Anthropic's AI research. He calls it the feedback loop behind recursive self-improvement, and argues the headline figure is already net of bottlenecks.

Transcript

Doom Debates! Around 25:11 into the episode
Liron Shapira

man, more competition for us.

Robert Wright

Yeah, I know. We should maybe kneecap the guy by saying more unflattering stuff about him. Stay

Liron Shapira

in your lane, Jensen. We got the media aspect covered. Okay, so that's putting a pin in the Jensen stuff. Stepping back to what matters even more, okay? Just this is like a red alert situation. A lot of people have been saying this. I mean, we do seem to be close to the singularity. We can put a concrete report on it. The famous meter report from the last few days. I think the headline result was: all things considered, AI has been making Anthropic twice as productive on net with their AI research. And remember, this is the only, this is the nuclear reaction here, right? This is the positive feedback loop. This is recursive self-improvement: will AI help build AI? And at first, if I was talking to a few months ago, our answer was like, yeah, of course, it's helping programmers write a little faster, right? It's doing autocomplete. It's making them 10%, 20% faster. So this is like the foothills of RSI. But look, twice as productive compared to a year ago, right? This is like, this is really, the neutrons are really starting to hit here. And this is, I should clarify, you know, in case twice doesn't sound that impressive. You know, Amdahl's law, it's…

Robert Wright

2027 report to begin with a couple of years ago.

Liron Shapira

Exactly right. And they're like, yep, okay, we now predict it in 2027. Like it's, it's, it's bad. I mean, the months are really ticking down. And so more and more people are saying, like, look, if we're going to make a move here, right, if we're going to pace the frontier, we really should do it…

Robert Wright

No, I think it's true. And let me give you my understanding of this meter thing, and you can correct me where I've got it wrong. But so meter comes out with a report that was based, I guess, both on access to internal anthropic stuff, maybe including interviews with employees, but also an…

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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