Epoch AI to spend more on compute than wages this year, researcher says
Jsevillamol · x · 2026-11-10
Epoch AI researcher Jsevillamol revealed the institute expects to spend more on compute than on wages this year, admitting the crossover arrived far faster than he anticipated.
He clarified that most of the compute spending goes to evaluation runs — including some very large experimental ones — rather than substituting for labor, but he hadn't budgeted for compute to overtake people costs yet. The detail underscores how rapidly evaluation spending is inflating AI research budgets.
Related event: Epoch AI's Compute Spending Set to Surpass Staff Wages for First Time(2 posts)→
More from AGI Musings
- Podcast asks: Are 50 people deciding humanity's AI future? Feat. Kevin Roose — JasonDClinton · 2026-11-10
- "Just Ban the Smarter-Than-Us Computer Aliens": A Intuitive Case for a Superintelligence Moratorium — AndyMasley · 2026-11-10
- Oxford launches AI philosophy series with $10k prize, bans AI-written papers — JessicaHullman · 2026-11-10
- "Academia has 5 years left tops": AI researcher's stark prediction — round · 2026-11-10
- Cohere's Aidan Gomez slams AI doomers: their safety fix is always less competition — cohere · 2026-11-10
- Software-for-agents will concentrate into ~3 unchallengeable super-moats around kernels like Linux and ffmpeg — wordgrammer · 2026-11-10