Chapter 2, the ladder of cost

The test. Falsified if no training run exceeds $1 billion by 31 December 2027, on Epoch AI’s reconstruction or a laboratory’s own disclosure.

open Open in October 2026; the largest reconstructed run is about $490 million.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Falls due

31 December 2027

Read on

Epoch AI’s reconstructions of training cost, and the laboratories’ own disclosures

Chapter

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.

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@misc{dryburgh-chapter-2-the-ladder-of-cost-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{Chapter 2, the ladder of cost}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests/2027-11},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}