AI's discovery boost is deeply uneven: cyber up sharply, math modest, optimization flat
METR scraped every public discovery time series it could find and looked for slope changes around a January 2026 breakpoint. Vulnerabilities jumped dramatically across cURL, OpenSSL, Firefox, Microsoft, and aggregate databases. Math accelerated somewhat, but harder to measure; optimizations barely moved. The punchline: exploitation databases (KEV) grew far slower than known-vulnerability counts, and not all that matters is public, since labs keep internal discoveries quiet.