Where is all the AI safety research uplift?

(Thanks to @Goutham Nalagatla for discussion and for sitting with me and talking about it while I wrote it.) METR recently released a report estimating that Anthropic is getting an overall 1.7x acceleration in AI capability progress as a result of AI accelerating their work. As many have noted (see e.g. Ajeya’s post), this 1.7x acceleration implies that research is being sped up by much more than 1.7x; Ajeya speculates 10x (which is similar to the ~12x uplift estimated by Anthropic staff).  That is, this result implies that researchers are producing about 10 times as many quality-adjusted results as they would without AI progress, or as they were a year or two ago. Anthropic researchers estimated that Mythos 5 caused 5x uplift, and we have access to Opus 5.5, which is somewhat better. (I didn’t take their estimate that seriously at the time, because it was quite unclear how the estimate was produced and it seemed very surprising (see Ryan’s discussion at the time), but I’m taking it more seriously now as a result of it being consistent with the METR report). If this is the case, then AIs speed up AI safety research as much as AI capabilities research, we might expect Anthropic safety researchers to be working 10x faster, and external safety researchers to be working 5x faster now and 10x faster soon. And external safety researchers can probably scale compute use faster than Anthropic capabilities researchers can. For example, we at Redwood are well-funded and would totally 5x our compute spend if we had 5x as many experiments to run, unlike Anthropic capabilities researchers who are presumably already doing a pretty good job of using all the compute they have. So I think that we should expect a 5x labor acceleration to turn into more like a 5x research project acceleration. I don't think our empirical research has been going 5x faster since we got access to Fable/Opus 5.5; I would have guessed more like 2-3x speedup. Why is this? •  Maybe we suck and have not adopte