The elasticity of software progress to researcher capability is maybe the most important quantity in RSI forecasting. IMO TasteVal provides the best evidence yet on the component of this quantity coming from *selecting better experiments* using fixed compute and coding labor.
How fast is AI's research taste improving?
We find that the experimental research taste of frontier models has doubled every ~3 months since December 2025. The best model, Opus 5.5, now exceeds our expert human baseline. Our human experts are experienced researchers, but most haven’t worked at a frontier lab.
Why measure research taste? In the AI Futures Model, it largely determines how quickly artificial superintelligence is reached once coding is fully automated.View quoted post on X
