Bottleneck or Breakout? Modeling the Compute Barrier to AI's Intelligence Explosion
TL;DR for operators The practical question is not whether AI will “think itself into godhood by Tuesday”. Charming as that spreadsheet would be, this paper is doing something narrower and more useful. Whitfill and Wu ask whether a software-only intelligence explosion can survive a compute bottleneck: if AI systems become good enough to replace human AI researchers, can that extra cognitive labour keep improving AI without a matching increase in research compute?1 ...