EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)9 Okt

“AI Scaling vs Human Scaling” by Toby_Ord

Audio note: this post contains a lot of mathematical notation. We narrate the simpler formulas and flag the complex ones, so you may want the original text to hand.

Do AI models scale as well with more tokens as humans do with more time?

That is, does an AI get the same benefit from 10x the number of available tokens as a human does from 10x the amount of time to do the task? Or might the AI require a larger scale-up of tokens (such as 20x or 100x) to match the performance improvement when scaling up the time available to a human by 10x?

People often think of giving AIs more tokens to complete a task as akin to giving a human worker more time — especially when those tokens are used to extend the AI's sequential chain of thought or tool use. It's a useful analogy, but it isn’t clear whether the AI systems are as efficient as the humans are at turning these extra resources into superior performance.

We often lean on this analogy when trying to understand AI's current capabilities and how they might change. For example, we might think of scaling up [...]

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First published:
October 9th, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/g6sdhN39so8rWBuYk/ai-scaling-vs-human-scaling

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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