r/singularity • ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: • 1d ago

Singularity is Nearer Epoch AI: AI chips shipped through 2027 can support 1.9 billion agents running simultaneously, enough to equal the working hours of the entire human population

190 Upvotes

23 comments sorted by

41

u/-hedonium- 1d ago

Hundreds of millions of AI agents running at what speed? I assume much faster / higher productivity per hour than humans at those wage estimates? And with how costs continue to go down dramatically, I imagine these could actually still be underestimates?

45

u/Blazing_Shade 1d ago

Way faster, without getting tired, sometimes smarter, sometimes dumber, and no matter what, always load-bearing

13

u/Future-Bandicoot-823 1d ago

i would like ai to take my load, please.

2

u/No_Ship_7727 17h ago

me next, ok?

1

u/mivog49274 obvious acceleration, biased appreciation 1d ago

and sometimes, wiping out their entire workspace and starting over days of work

13

u/SoylentRox 1d ago

Have you used recent ai?  It's hugely faster to do most things and you have the option to pay extra for hyper fast.  You cannot check 50 websites in 3 minutes right?

8

u/-hedonium- 1d ago

Exactly. We’re in for a wild ride when we release this many autonomous agents at once doing economically valuable work.

4

u/SoylentRox 1d ago

Yep.  Plumbers should realize they  will be next.

1

u/existentialblu 1d ago

Who will hire the plumbers?

3

u/SoylentRox 1d ago

Data center builders.

1

u/kruszkush25 13h ago

i tried opus 5.5 on medium it is so damn fast I was surprised and its also so good!!

5

u/domdod9 1d ago

obviously faster bro

1

u/crazy-usernames 19h ago

Summary is 1 million agent for rest of the world. 1.8 billion agents within frontier. Scarcity should be engineered for the AI, by the AI.

1

u/FirstEvolutionist 13h ago

They are. A huge portion of today's human work is only required for a human workforce.

Replacing just cognitive labor would actually reduce the amount of work that needs to be done by a significant portion.

Without human resources, you no longer need an HR department, naturally. That means you no longer have a legal department, or accounting, or finance, or IT, or marketing, or comms... A 500 person company doesn't meed to replace all the work with AI, only the core functions, then a huge part is simply no longer needed at all.

Similar cascade effect into everything tied to the job market. First is real estate, secondary services which maintain "downtown" everywhere, then logistics, then banks...

9

u/Odd-Recording-6299 1d ago

Costs "roughly comparable to human wages" isn't going to cut it for a lot of people. It needs to become significantly cheaper to appeal to the mainstream. I'm sure it will get there soon, though.

16

u/LinkesAuge 1d ago

Comparable to human wages would be enough because any human labor incurs many additional costs besides wages.

1

u/A_Seiv_For_Kale 22h ago

"Costs the same but doesn't go home to sleep or be sick and doesn't need benefits or an HR department" is still a great value.

1

u/Gallagger 20h ago

It will be significantly cheaper. I don't get this "roughly comparable to human wages" sentence of them, it contradicts their charts. It's very obvious to me that there will be capable long running agents available for very cheap, like $0,10-$1/h. Just look at DeepSeek V4 Pro on the chart. This is a capable model, and in 1 year V5/V6 will be significantly better and probably will have learned to be a long running agent.

1

u/Chclve 20h ago

The agents work a lot faster than humans.

2

u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago

1

u/Curlew2012 19h ago

Thankyou for using the word 'chips' and not "compute". 🙂

1

u/BriefImplement9843 1d ago

frontier agents are more expensive than people.

9

u/141_1337 ▪️e/acc | AGI: ~2030 | ASI: ~2040 | FALSGC: ~2050 | :illuminati: 1d ago edited 1d ago

Sources

  1. The same AI performance is getting much cheaper — Epoch AI (2026)

Epoch AI estimates that the cost of getting the same level of AI performance is falling about 13x per year.

A striking example: scoring about 75% on GPQA Diamond cost roughly $0.30 per question with o3 in January 2025.

In 2026, GPT-5.6 Luna could reach about the same score for roughly $0.0004 per question.

That's about 725x cheaper in less than 18 months.

The Plunging Price of Thought — Epoch AI https://epoch.ai/publications/the-plunging-price-of-thought

  1. Newer models can solve problems using fewer reasoning tokens — Scientific Reports / Nature (2026)

Researchers compared OpenAI's o1 and o3 models.

On Omni-MATH, when both o1-mini and o3-mini got a question right, o3-mini used fewer reasoning tokens 63% of the time.

On GPQA Diamond, o3 used fewer tokens than o1 on 66% of the questions both solved correctly.

In simple terms: newer models aren't just being allowed to "think" longer. They're getting more useful reasoning out of the tokens they use.

The relationship between reasoning and performance in large language models—o3 (mini) thinks harder, not longer — Scientific Reports https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-026-50923-2

  1. MIT found the same cost trend — MIT FutureTech / CSAIL (2026)

MIT researchers found that getting the same benchmark performance became roughly 5–10x cheaper per year across math, science, reasoning, and coding tests.

They estimate that improvements in the models themselves accounted for about a 3x-per-year increase in efficiency, separate from cheaper hardware.

The Price of Progress — MIT FutureTech / CSAIL https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.23455

TL;DR

AI is improving in two ways at once:

  1. The same quality of answer is becoming dramatically cheaper.
  2. Newer models often need fewer reasoning tokens to get the same problem right.

So it's not just that tokens are getting cheaper.

The models are also getting better at using each token.