The pace at which the technology’s capability advances, which runs faster than the adoption clock, and against which the money was committed. The Scorecard uses the same words for the first of its three groups of rows, which ask when a model can do its own research. See Scorecard’s clocks. Chapter 3.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
The book uses this term in a sense of its own.
Defined in Chapter 14 — The Convergence.
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 3 — The Missing Researcher
The dated promise of an AI that does its own research, what the laboratories have published, and what the public record can and cannot yet check.
Also discussed in
- Dated test Chapter 2, compute moved rather than stopped
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Capability clock.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/capability-clock (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-capability-clock-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Capability clock}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/capability-clock},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}