Douglas: The entire AI industry scored under 20% on SWE-bench last year
Sholto Douglas · Sonnet 4.5 & the AI Plateau Myth — Sholto Douglas (Anthropic) · Oct 2, 2025 · at 33:05
Sholto Douglas, an AI researcher at Anthropic, discusses the pace of progress in AI coding capabilities over the past year.
0:00 / 0:04exact quote · 4.5s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“As recently as a year ago, I think we were under 20% or something like that as a field.”
quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →
More from Sholto Douglas
Douglas: Anthropic believes AGI is reachable in a couple of years
“We think that, you know, AGI is within reach in the next couple of years.”
Douglas: AI industry will reach human-level computer capabilities in 2-3 years
“Which is that in the next two or three years, given the right feedback loops, given the right compute, given the right, you know, elbow grease and this kind of stuff, we think that we as the AI industry are all on track to create something that is at least as …”
Douglas: Transformers successfully model any domain given sufficient data and compute
“I don't think that's true. I think we haven't yet really found anything that transformers haven't been able to model provided sufficient data and sufficient compute.”
Douglas: Independent technical blogs are the highest AI hiring signals
“The fastest route, or like, the most immediate one is whenever we see a really good blog post where people have, like, done incredible amount of work in an independent fashion, it's one of the highest signal things there is.”