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Equation 1 · Part 8 · From Origins to Frontier: A History of Claude Code and Agentic Development Tools

multiplication

T50(t)  =  T0⋅2 (t−t0)/τ,τ≈7 months,T_{50}(t) \;=\; T_0 \cdot 2^{\,(t - t_0)/\tau}, \qquad \tau \approx 7 \text{ months},
multiplication

What this part means

Multiply the quantities on either side.

Its job in the formula

Multiply the quantities on either side.

The passage around this formula

A second, independently run measurement effort took a different approach: instead of asking whether an agent could solve one fixed set of tasks, it asked how long a task an agent could complete autonomously with 50% reliability, using human professional completion time as the unit. METR’s March 2025 study, compiled from 170 tasks and more than 800 human timing baselines across software engineering, cybersecurity and general reasoning work, reported that this “50%-task-completion time horizon” for frontier agents had been doubling approximately every seven months for six years running, and that the finding was robust to an order-of-magnitude error in the underlying measurements, which would…

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Learn the underlying idea

Multiplication scales one quantity by another. A dot, a cross, or adjacent symbols can indicate a product.

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Sources cited in the surrounding passage

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