# "Estimating No-CoT Task-Completion Time Horizons of Frontier AI Models" by Anders Cairns Woodruff, Francis Rhys Ward, Dewi Gould, Rauno Arike, Jason R Brown, Jo Jiao, wlanderson, ariana_azarbal, harrymayne, Patrick Leask

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401/estimating-no-cot-task-completion-time-horizons-of-frontier-ai-models-by-anders-cairns-woodruff-francis-rhys-ward-dewi-gould-rauno-arike-jason-r-brown-jo-jiao-wlanderson-ariana-azarbal-harrymayne-patrick-leask
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Podcast: [LessWrong (Curated & Popular)](https://stenobird.com/podcast/lesswrong-curated-popular-5643401)
Published: 2026-06-11T12:45:43+00:00
Episode link: https://www.buzzsprout.com/2037297/episodes/19330600-estimating-no-cot-task-completion-time-horizons-of-frontier-ai-models-by-anders-cairns-woodruff-francis-rhys-ward-dewi-gould-rauno-arike-jason-r-brown-jo-jiao-wlanderson-ariana_azarbal-harrymayne-patrick-leask.mp3
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Duration seconds: 604

## Resource

(see full author list at the end) PAPER LINK About a year ago, METR showed that the length of tasks frontier models can reliably complete doubles every few months. A related safety-relevant question is this: what length of tasks can models complete without any chain of thought (CoT)? If models can do extensive reasoning without outputting any CoT, it would have implications for safety. Developers and deployment-time monitors couldn’t easily understand models’ motivations and catch dang...

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