Co-Existence release accompanies 30-month review of AI progress
The author released the AI book Co-Existence and used the occasion to review AI progress over the 30 months since Co-Intelligence, presenting the changes in charts. He reports delegating chart production to Opus 5.5 in Claude Projects, where an orchestrator could assign work to additional agents. He says the system handled research, graphing, layouts, images and citations after brief guidance. The post also examines data from the METR Long Horizon Benchmark, reports declining inference costs, and describes a shift from chatbots toward agentic and multi-agent work. In a separate example, the author used Opus 5.5 with online services from Google and ElevenLabs to produce an AI-generated video from his prompt. The benchmark figures, cost comparisons and time-saving estimate are the author's reported claims and were not independently validated in the supplied report.
The post combines a METR-attributed benchmark discussion with a firsthand account of using an Opus 5.5 orchestrator and additional agents to complete a multi-step creative project, illustrating the reported shift from step-by-step chatbot use toward delegated AI work.
My second book on AI, Co-Existence, is out today (and you can get it here), 30 months after the release of Co-Intelligence in early 2024. Looking back across the gap between these books is a good way to get a sense of AI progress. And, thanks to AI, I can describe this progress with some quite lovely charts.
Making the charts is itself a good indicator of how far things have come. In the era of chatbots, the era of Co-Intelligence, I would have had to work back-and-forth with an AI in a chat window, guiding it through each new step. In the current era of agentic AI that I cover in Co-Existence, I delegated the work and let the AI handle it. In this case, I used Opus 5.5 in Claude Projects, which allows you to talk to a single “orchestrator” agent that then spins off additional agents as needed, giving them instructions and relaying information back to you. Getting the work done was straightforward. I gave the AI a couple sentences of suggestions and it did what would have taken me hours of work (all the research, all the graphing, all the layouts, all the images, all the citations…) in minutes. And since I didn’t have to do the work, I had the AI make many options for me. I picked some and gave handwavy reactions to others that would drive a human team mad (“make it better”). It even caught that I’d gotten the math wrong. I was going to call this post “28 months on the exponential.”
#Claude Opus 5.5#Claude Projects#Anthropic#Co-Existence#Co-Intelligence#GPT-4#OpenAI#Google#METR Long Horizon Benchmark#Midjourney#ElevenLabs