# Is there a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents? — Toby Ord

<https://www.tobyord.com/writing/half-life>

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- Saved: June 19, 2025 (2025-06-19T17:11:51Z)
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## What Jamie wrote

Frankly I’m amazed at the accuracy for these tasks at these durations. I figured it would be a 1 or 5 minute task, not 59 minutes. 

> For the best model (Claude 3.7 Sonnet) it could achieve a 50% success rate on tasks up to 59 minutes _vs_ only 15 minutes if an 80% success rate was required. If those results generalise to the other models, then we could also see it like this: the task length for an 80% success rate is 1/4 the task length for a 50% success rate. Or in terms of improvement: what is doable with a 50% success rate now is doable with an 80% success rate in 14 months' time (= 2 doubling times).

Also the rate of improvement is fast.

## Facts

- Kind: [Page](https://links.thingelstad.xyz/kinds/page/)

## Appears in

- [WT324: Weekly Thing 324 / Agents, Shortcuts, Joy](https://weekly.thingelstad.com/archive/324/), Notable

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