The Scaling Series Discussion Thread: with Toby Ord
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Toby Tremlett🔹·Toby_Ord
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This EA Forum discussion thread is part of a series engaging prominent thinkers on AI scaling trends and their safety implications, featuring philosopher and existential risk researcher Toby Ord in conversation with the effective altruism community.
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AI safetyBuilding effective altruismAI forecastingEffective Altruism ForumEvents on the EA Forum
Part of sequence: The Scaling Series
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Summary
A discussion thread on the EA Forum featuring Toby Ord as part of a 'Scaling Series,' likely exploring the implications of AI scaling for existential risk and long-term safety. The thread provides a forum for community engagement with Ord's views on how rapid capability scaling intersects with broader concerns about catastrophic risk.
Key Points
- •Features Toby Ord, author of 'The Precipice,' discussing AI scaling in the context of existential risk
- •Part of a broader 'Scaling Series' examining the safety implications of increasingly powerful AI systems
- •EA Forum format allows community Q&A and engagement with expert perspectives on scaling risks
- •Connects mainstream AI scaling discourse to existential risk and long-termist frameworks
- •Likely addresses questions about whether scaling trends are compatible with safe AI development
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# The Scaling Series Discussion Thread: with Toby Ord
By Toby Tremlett🔹, Toby_Ord
Published: 2026-02-02
We're trying something a bit new this week. Over the last year, Toby Ord has been writing about the implications of the fact that improvements in AI require exponentially more compute. Only one of these posts so far has been put on the EA forum.
This week we've put the entire series on the Forum and made this thread for you to discuss your reactions to the posts. Toby Ord will check in once a day to respond to your comments[^c609ni1io0j].
Feel free to also comment directly on the individual posts that make up this sequence, but you can treat this as a central discussion space for both general takes and more specific questions.
If you haven't read the series yet...
Read it here
...or choose a post to start with:
[**Are the Costs of AI Agents Also Rising Exponentially?**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/AbHPpGTtAMyenWGX8/are-the-costs-of-ai-agents-also-rising-exponentially)
Agents can do longer and longer tasks, but their dollar cost to do these tasks may be growing even faster.
[**How Well Does RL Scale?**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/TysuCdgwDnQjH3LyY/how-well-does-rl-scale)
I show that RL-training for LLMs scales much worse than inference or pre-training.
[**Evidence that Recent AI Gains are Mostly from Inference-Scaling**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/5zfubGrJnBuR5toiK/evidence-that-recent-ai-gains-are-mostly-from-inference)
I show how most of the recent AI gains in reasoning come from spending much more compute every time the model is run.
[**The Extreme Inefficiency of RL for Frontier Models**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/64iwgmMvGSTBHPdHg/the-extreme-inefficiency-of-rl-for-frontier-models)
The new RL scaling paradigm for AI reduces the amount of information a model could learn per hour of training by a factor of 1,000 to 1,000,000. What follows?
[**Is There a Half-Life for the Success Rates of AI Agents?**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/qz3xyqCeriFHeTAJs/is-there-a-half-life-for-the-success-rates-of-ai-agents-3)
The declining success rates of AI agents on longer-duration tasks can be explained by a simple mathematical model — a constant rate of failing during each minute a human would take to do the task.
[**Inference Scaling Reshapes AI Governance**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/RnsgMzsnXcceFfKip/inference-scaling-reshapes-ai-governance)
The shift towards inference scaling may mean the end of an era for AI governance. I explore the many consequences.
[**Inference Scaling and the Log-x Chart**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/zNymXezwySidkeRun/inference-scaling-and-the-log-x-chart)
The new trend to scaling up inference compute in AI has come hand-in-hand with an unusual new type of chart that can be highly misleading.
[**The Scaling Paradox**](https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/742xJNTqer2Dt9Cxx/the-scaling-paradox)
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