Saturday, 4 October 2025

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🔮 Exponential View #544: Robotics flywheels. Sora & the AI economy. Space waves, solar booms & biosecurity exposed ++

Azeem Azhar and Marija Gavrilov

Oct 5

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In today’s Sunday briefing:

The path to AI completing month-long projects without supervision
OpenAI is building an economy inside itself
China hits the robotics flywheel and again, the West isn’t ready
Plus: gravitational waves, AI and biosecurity, Pakistan’s solar boom, loud equity analysts and the architecture of values.

I had a fun conversation with China expert Dan Wang, whose latest book Breakneck is doing the rounds for all the right reasons. Our research notes on this China conversation are available exclusively to members of Exponential View.

AI shows up at work

This week, we shared our estimates for the 99% step-length – the number of actions an AI system can take at near-perfect reliability before a human must intervene. Today’s frontier systems reliably manage around 100 steps at that threshold. By our estimates, the number could exceed 10,000 by 2029. A couple of years later, they might have between 3x and 10x that range. At that scale, an AI system could operate for weeks, potentially months, without supervision.

Anthropic’s Claude 4.5 Sonnet, the best-in-class coding model, can reportedly work autonomously for 30 hours on a codebase, a significant jump from the seven-hour ceiling just months ago...