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Data InsightsThe length of software tasks AI systems can do on their own has been increasing quickly

The length of software tasks AI systems can do on their own has been increasing quickly

A chart illustrates the improvement of AI systems in performing longer software tasks over time. The horizontal axis spans from 2019 to mid 2025, marking the development of various AI models, such as GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, and several iterations of GPT-4. The vertical axis indicates the length of time in minutes that tasks  take human professionals. Key points highlighted include:

- "GPT 3.5 (which came out in Spring 2022) could only do tasks that take humans a few seconds, such as selecting the right file"
- "OpenAI's o3(which came out in April 2025) can do tasks on its own that take humans 20 minutes," such as finding and fixing small bugs in code
- The observed trend shows a rapid progression in AI capability

Accompanying notes indicate that the data is based on 170 tasks across fields like software engineering and machine learning. The source for this data is the Model Evaluation & Threat Research (METR) from 2025, presented under a Creative Commons attribution license.

How will artificial intelligence (AI) impact people’s jobs?

This question has no simple answer, but the more AI systems can independently carry out long, job-like tasks, the greater their impact will likely be.

The chart shows a trend in this direction for software-related tasks. The length of tasks — in terms of how long they take human professionals — that AIs can do on their own has increased quickly in the past couple of years.

Before 2023, even the best AI systems could only perform tasks that take people around 10 seconds, such as selecting the right file.

Today, the best AIs can fairly reliably (with an 80% success rate) do tasks that take people 20 minutes or more, such as finding and fixing bugs in code or configuring common software packages.

It’s unclear how much these results generalize; other factors, like reliability, need to be considered.

But AI capabilities continue to improve, and if developments keep pace for the next few years, we could see systems capable of performing tasks that take people days or even longer.

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