Elasticity Institute's @cherylwoooo says OpenAI's coding-agent spend doubling monthly could be one of the clearest signals that researchers are becoming increasingly reliant on AI: "The fact that they use more inference tokens means that AI's input into research has become more and more important over time." "If you ask me whether I would take money to not use AI, I probably would say no because I'm so reliant on it. But does it really mean that my productivity goes up by that much? I'm not…

Epoch AI@EpochAIResearch2d ago

OpenAI recently published data on its researchers’ coding-agent usage. We took their weekly figures from January to mid-August 2026 and fitted trends to summarize how quickly spending grew. We found that spending has been doubling about once a month.