One must also consider the well-known biases and motives of the authors. They are going to do everything they can to create hype around threats posed by AI.
METR is a cog in the effective altruism machine. It was spun off from Paul Christiano's Alignment Research Center. Christiano is a well-known longtermist and AI doomer, who predicts a 50% chance that AI will end humanity once it reaches human capacity [1].
The author of this piece is also a well-known member of the Bay Area rationalist cult.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-researcher-ai-doom-50...