The finding, published in January 2020, that a model’s loss falls as a clean power law in its parameters, its data and the compute spent. They say how much more compute each further reduction takes, which made a training run priceable. Chapter 2.
From The AI Compute Race. Read the book
Where the book uses it
- Chapter 2 — The Discovery That Changed Everything
How a formula about compute and capability became a bill: the scaling laws, the first supercomputers built to test them, and why the money came before the paper.
Where the record uses it
- Person Kaplan, Jared
Also discussed in
- Chapter notes Chapter 2 — The Discovery That Changed Everything
Related terms
From the glossary of The AI Compute Race.
How to cite this page
Dryburgh, Lee S. “Scaling laws.” In The AI Compute Race. DRYBURGH. https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/scaling-laws (accessed 2026-11-01).
BibTeX
@misc{dryburgh-scaling-laws-2026,
author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
title = {{Scaling laws}},
howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
year = {2026},
url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/glossary/scaling-laws},
note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}