Home Speakers Dwarkesh Patel Quote If by 2028 we’ve automated software engineering and the price of compute is 15x higher than it is right now, then it’s going to be much more difficult for you, with no revenue, to compete for compute against the frontier labs.
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This is one of many reasons why I think it’s unwise to lock in some kind of regulatory safety regime right now. We simply don’t know what kind of technology we’re going to be looking at even in a year, let alone in five years or ten years, and we’d be entrenching an archaic and potentially counterproductive approach to dealing with the threats from AI. Essay 8 Predictions for the Era of Continual Learning Aug 7, 2026
When deployment becomes part of training, the returns to being ahead will accelerate. Essay Why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years Jul 29, 2026
I want to emphasize the key conclusion here: as AI models become smarter, they’ll better monetize the same amount of compute. If a true human-level software engineer that could run on an H100 equivalent, at current market rates for software engineers, that H100 should rent for over $250k a year. Essay Why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years Jul 29, 2026
I wish we didn’t live in a world with such strong economies of scale of intelligence (because I’m worried about power concentration). Essay Why compute might get 10x+ more expensive in coming years Jul 29, 2026
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I think the reason it is relatively easy for open source and previous laggards to catch up to within months of the frontier is that data is the real driver of progress. Essay The data black hole at the center of AI Jun 19, 2026
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But in the real world, power is more the product of having the authority and trust to get lots of people to collaborate with you, rather than some galaxy brain scheming capability. Essay The mistake of conflating intelligence and power May 16, 2026
I’m simply pointing out that the way AI systems are currently becoming smarter (by getting trained to be to be really good at specific economically valuable tasks like coding) is not that strongly correlated with power.
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If the top U.S. labs have to give up on what is supposed to be really important, they will look very “catchable.” The policy creates a big incentive for some other parts of the world to invest a lot more in compute. Blog Frontier Overhangs Sep 21, 2026
A world with sufficient compute is one where intelligence is a commodity, and in commodity markets margin comes from a superior cost structure, which I would expect the leading model providers to have, in part because they have a meaningful lead in scaling and can apply superior AI to their infrastructure. Blog Frontier Overhangs Sep 21, 2026
What this means is that model performance isn’t the only thing that matters: the integration between model and harness is where true agent differentiation is found. About this quote 
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