Toby Ord critiques AI-vs-human scaling claim: early models and confusing scaling math

tobyordoxford · x · 2026-10-09

Toby Ord questions a scaling comparison implying humans gain 4x more per doubling, meaning AIs would need 10,000x more tokens to match 10x human time. He argues the chart has serious limitations: it evaluates very early models (Sonnet 3.5 isn't even a reasoning model) and confusingly mixes linear token/time scaling with parallel scaling.

Related event: Oxford's Toby Ord: AI Token Scaling Still Lags Human Time Scaling(5 posts)→

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