Toby Ord pushes back on Chollet: halving benchmark error isn't exponential AI growth
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-10-09
Oxford researcher Toby Ord joined the debate over whether AI progress is exponential or linear. He argues that defining exponential growth as 'benchmark error rates halving in fixed time intervals' fails: benchmarks show no such growth until roughly the halfway point, so everything before then isn't exponential. On a log-odds scale growth looks roughly linear, which actually implies logistic — not exponential — growth, which is what the ECI essentially measures.
Related event: Oxford's Toby Ord rebuts Chollet on exponential AI progress(3 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- OpenAI Researcher: Econ Theorists Have the Best Intuitions for Managing Agent Swarms — willcb · 2026-10-10
- Terence Tao: The Era of "Big M" Mathematics and "Big P" Physics Has Arrived — CatAstro_Piyush · 2026-10-10
- Sakana AI Researcher on Why Artificial Life Ideas Matter More as Autonomous AIs Proliferate — kenneth0stanley · 2026-10-10
- NBER: Machinery's Skill Bias Comes From Suppliers — High-STEM Demand Rises 45% Externally — soumitrashukla9 · 2026-10-10
- Quanta: as AI cracks math's hardest problems, mathematicians face existential reckoning — MacrinePhD · 2026-10-10
- When AI Writes the Code, What Replaces Design Patterns? — JnBrymn · 2026-10-10