6h ago

METR economist Tom Cunningham argues AI agents face faster diminishing marginal returns on expenditure than human labor

Ryan Greenblatt counters that scalability favors agent spending.

——0——
Original post
OPRyan Greenblatt#961Ryan Greenblatt@RYANPGREENBLATT

@testingham > we might see a small expenditure-share on agentic labor, even when they're producing a lot of value I moderately disagree. Human-AI complementarity, easy scaling of AI labor, and de facto price discrimination, means optimal wages vs agents split may be >50% agents earlier on.

10:02 AM · May 29, 2026 View on X
REPLYHerbie Bradley#1022Herbie Bradley@HERBIEBRADLEY

@testingham how does this account for human-AI teaming? the paradigmatic example is a task which would have taken a human 6 months, but the agents can 80% do it in a day, then the human takes 2 weeks to finish it off collaboratively with the agent

IMO a lot of the frontier is currently this

tom cunninghamtom cunningham@testingham

I think most domains look like this at the moment: the returns to expenditure on agents diminish much more quickly than the returns to expenditure on human labor: (1/n)

11:47 AM · May 29, 2026 · 13.2K Views
5:19 PM · May 29, 2026 · 241 Views
METR economist Tom Cunningham argues AI agents face faster diminishing marginal returns on expenditure than human labor · Digg