[Linkpost] “Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?” by Toby_Ord
EA Forum Podcast (Curated & popular)2 Feb

[Linkpost] “Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?” by Toby_Ord

This is a link post.

There is an extremely important question about the near-future of AI that almost no-one is asking.

We’ve all seen the graphs from METR showing that the length of tasks AI agents can perform has been growing exponentially over the last 7 years. While GPT-2 could only do software engineering tasks that would take someone a few seconds, the latest models can (50% of the time) do tasks that would take a human a few hours.

As this trend shows no signs of stopping, people have naturally taken to extrapolating it out, to forecast when we might expect AI to be able to do tasks that take an engineer a full work-day; or week; or year.

But we are missing a key piece of information — the cost of performing this work.

Over those 7 years AI systems have grown exponentially. The size of the models (parameter count) has grown by 4,000x and the number of times they are run in each task (tokens generated) has grown by about 100,000x. AI researchers have also found massive efficiencies, but it is eminently plausible that the cost for the peak performance measured by METR has been [...]

---

Outline:

(13:02) Conclusions

(14:05) Appendix

(14:08) METR has a similar graph on their page for GPT-5.1 codex. It includes more models and compares them by token counts rather than dollar costs:

---

First published:
February 2nd, 2026

Source:
https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AbHPpGTtAMyenWGX8/are-the-costs-of-ai-agents-also-rising-exponentially

Linkpost URL:
https://www.tobyord.com/writing/hourly-costs-for-ai-agents

---

Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

---

Images from the article:

Apple Podcasts and Spotify do not show images in the episode description. Try Pocket Casts, or another podcast app.

Avsnitt(250)

[Linkpost] “Starfish” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

[Linkpost] “Starfish” by Aaron Gertler 🔸

This is a link post. By Alexander Wales Thousands of starfish had washed up on the beach, and a little girl was diligently throwing them back into the water, one at a time. A man came up to the girl a...

1 Maj 4min

“Time Sensitive Urgent Animal Welfare Action” by Bentham’s Bulldog

“Time Sensitive Urgent Animal Welfare Action” by Bentham’s Bulldog

The EATS act—now called the save our bacon act—would make it illegal for states to pass animal welfare laws that apply to products produced out of state. This would gut most state level animal protect...

29 Apr 1min

“Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

“Forecasting is Way Overrated, and We Should Stop Funding It” by Marcus Abramovitch 🔸

Summary EA and rationalists got enamoured with forecasting and prediction markets and made them part of the culture, but this hasn’t proven very useful, yet it continues to receive substantial EA fun...

26 Apr 8min

“My lover, effective altruism” by Natalie_Cargill

“My lover, effective altruism” by Natalie_Cargill

Crossposted from Substack. This post is part of a 30-posts-in-30-days ordeal at Inkhaven. All suboptimalities are the result of that. This is part 2, here is part 1 in my EA mini series! On my way to ...

26 Apr 8min

“A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer

“A Database of Near-Term Interventions for Wild Animals” by Bob Fischer

The Animal Welfare Department (AWD) at Rethink Priorities supports high-impact strategies to help animals, especially where suffering is vast and largely neglected. Therefore, one of our focus areas i...

24 Apr 17min

“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

“The AI people have been right a lot” by Dylan Matthews

This post was crossposted from Dylan Matthew's blog by the EA Forum team. The author may not see or reply to comments. Subtitle: Try to keep an open mind as the world gets increasingly wild.The crowd ...

20 Apr 10min

[Linkpost] “The Anthropic IPO Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready for It.” by Sophie Kim

[Linkpost] “The Anthropic IPO Is Coming. We Aren’t Ready for It.” by Sophie Kim

This is a link post. More money is coming than AI safety has ever seen. The capacity to deploy it doesn't exist yet.Image Source: Fortune.com This week, Anthropic announced Claude Mythos Preview– a mo...

17 Apr 15min

“AI Safety’s Biggest Talent Gap Isn’t Researchers. It’s Generalists.” by Topaz, Agustín Covarrubias 🔸, Alexandra Bates, Parv Mahajan, Kairos

“AI Safety’s Biggest Talent Gap Isn’t Researchers. It’s Generalists.” by Topaz, Agustín Covarrubias 🔸, Alexandra Bates, Parv Mahajan, Kairos

This post was cross posted to LessWrong TL;DR: One of the largest talent gaps in AI safety is competent generalists: program managers, fieldbuilders, operators, org leaders, chiefs of staff, founders....

16 Apr 13min

Populärt inom Samhälle & Kultur

podme-dokumentar
gynning-berg
aftonbladet-krim
en-mork-historia
p3-dokumentar
creepypodden-med-jack-werner
skaringer-nessvold
svenska-fall
spar
aftonbladet-daily
killradet
hor-har
kod-katastrof
mardromsgasten
rss-brottsutredarna
flashback-forever
vad-blir-det-for-mord
rysarpodden
rss-mer-an-bara-morsa
larm-vi-minns