Bottleneck or Breakout? Modeling the Compute Barrier to AI's Intelligence Explosion
Is artificial intelligence on the brink of recursively improving itself into superintelligence? The theoretical path—recursive self-improvement (RSI)—has become a cornerstone of AGI forecasting. But one inconvenient constraint looms large: compute. Can software alone drive an intelligence explosion, or will we hit a hardware ceiling? A new paper by Whitfill and Wu (2025) tackles this with rare empirical rigor. Their key contribution is estimating the elasticity of substitution between research compute and cognitive labor across four major AI labs (OpenAI, DeepMind, Anthropic, and DeepSeek) over the past decade. The result: the answer depends on how you define the production function of AI research. ...