When they can perform a task, AIs are much cheaper than humans

AI systems are increasingly capable of substantial work. I'm old enough to remember 2025, when METR's time-horizon graph climbed from seven-minute tasks at 80% reliability at the start of the year to tasks taking more than an hour by the end. The time horizons for Astra and Fable 5.1 are now so long that METR's current task suite cannot reliably estimate them. But the recent Hugging Face attack and a slew of mathematics results show that frontier systems are now capable of some tasks that would take months or years of human effort. Sure, AIs have now solved a Millennium Prize problem , but at what cost? Doing a task is not the same as doing it cheaply. AI systems will only replace human workers if running them costs less than paying the workers. Perhaps these feats are expensive, so that even once AI can do the work, compute limits how many workers it replaces. But if AI systems are already cheap and AGI really is a few years away, we could soon be living in a world with vast numbers of digital workers, which could threaten not only our jobs but also our continued control over the future. The data To investigate, I used GPT-6 Astra and Fable 5.1 to create a database of AI tasks , comparing the compute an AI system needs to perform a task with the time a human would take to perform the same task. The estimates of both are necessarily crude. Frontier AI companies don't publish how much compute their latest models use, how many parameters they have, or what their architecture i…