The three rates, measured in chapter 1, at which a frontier lead spreads to rivals. They are frontier turnover from model to model at the American frontier, capability catch-up by open-weight models, and the national frontier lag of China’s frontier behind America’s. Chapter 1.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
The book uses this term in a sense of its own.
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 1 — The Stakes
What the race is for: the belief that a lead in AI can compound into a lasting advantage, how long such leads have actually lasted, and what a trillion dollars a year is being bet against.
Also discussed in
- Dated test Chapters 1 and 12, the second route
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Clocks of diffusion.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/clocks-of-diffusion (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-clocks-of-diffusion-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Clocks of diffusion}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/clocks-of-diffusion},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}