Toby Ord floats power-law scaling of CoT efficiency, testable via nanoGPT speedruns
tobyordoxford · x · 2026-10-21
In a technical thread on the RSI (recursive self-improvement) literature, Oxford's Toby Ord conjectures that efficiency gains from longer chain-of-thought may follow a power law, implying a constant β. If instead efficiency scales only logarithmically with CoT, β grows unboundedly and forces the growth rate r toward zero. He suggests nanoGPT speedrun data — with 1/time as an efficiency measure — could empirically test this hypothesis.
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