AI Progress Accelerated 90% in 2024 (Epoch), Gemini Lead: No Plateau, AI Practices Medicine in USA

Captions as YouTube publishes them, usually machine-generated, so product and people names can be misheard.

1. 0:00

   Good morning. Legion. We have Legion meet ups in Kuala Lumpur and Minsk this weekend, with another eight coming for the rest of January and currently 12 on schedule for February. Starting off the year fast. Just how we like it.

2. 0:14

   The stories for today are pretty important as indicators of where we stand in the build out of AI and various timelines that have been thrown around. We start with our first story from Epoch AI, and the latest insights on how AI capabilities have changed in 2025.

3. 0:29

   As the graphic demonstrates, things have sped up quite significantly. Published at the end of 2025, the authors write that the best score on the Epoch Capabilities Index grew almost twice as fast over the last two years as it did over the two years before that, with a 90% acceleration in April of 2024.

4. 0:49

   Our second story is from the Substack of Samuel Albanie, who works as the Frontier advisors lead for Gemini. He dropped a fantastic piece at the end of the year called reflections on 2025. Here are some of the most important quotes from that article.

5. 1:03

   And this first quote is in reference to AI. He writes, we're not approaching a plateau. The octopus is done with the jar. It's now unscrewing the aquarium. And in this analogy, the octopus refers to AI capabilities. He goes on to write.

6. 1:18

   The surface area of necessary evaluation has exploded from the tidy confines of digit classification to the messy reality of the human condition. The entire global economy and the development of AI itself. We must now accredit a universal polymath on a curriculum that includes everything from international diplomacy to the correct usage of the Oxford comma.

7. 1:39

   This is in reference to how evals will work with AI going forward as AI gets more advanced. His last quote, which I think is most telling for the future, says we are likely to soon see systems that radically reduce the cost of both software and hardware.

8. 1:55

   Let's see how 2026 plays out on that front. Last up, our third AI story. Today I just became legally authorized to practice medicine in the USA. Doctronic launched a pilot where its AI renews prescriptions for chronic conditions, reviews history, ask questions, and sends the Rx to the pharmacy.

9. 2:12

   Well, this is more of an AI aid at the current point in time than a standalone autonomous doctor. It is a sign of how fast AI is coming and transforming existing medical processes. An entirely different AI health product was recently created via fine tuning a model on over 585,000 hours of sleep data from 65,000 participants, to create an AI model that specializes in diagnosing illness based on sleep patterns.

10. 2:38

    Finding that from one night of sleep, it might be able to diagnose more than 130 diseases. That study, now published in nature, confirms the positive, transformative impact that AI is likely to bring in the coming years, especially when it comes to diagnosing health issues.

11. 2:53

    We hope you've had a great 2025 and an even better start to 2026. Subscribe and join the Near Legion for more stories like this. As you prepare for NEAR’s, user-owned AI and the march to NEARvana continues.