AI scales worse with more tokens than humans do with more time — but is catching up
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-10-09
In a new essay, Toby Ord (Oxford) asks: do AI models scale as well with more tokens as humans do with more time?
Reviewing the limited evidence, he argues AI has scaled less well with more tokens than humans do with more time — but appears to be catching up, offering a useful cross-species lens on the test-time compute scaling path.
Related event: Oxford's Toby Ord: AI Token Scaling Still Lags Human Time Scaling(5 posts)→
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