Chapters 1 and 12, the first route

The test. Supported if one laboratory holds an independently measured frontier lead through three or more complete improvement cycles, which at a three-month training run is nine months or more without a break. Undermined if American leadership has gone on rotating between laboratories since 1 January 2027 at a median laboratory tenure under thirteen weeks, less than one such cycle and near the present rate of about ten weeks. Both limbs count laboratories: a laboratory’s consecutive leading models make one tenure. A record that meets neither limb, a median of thirteen weeks or more with no lead held for nine months, scores neither. If Epoch has published no count of lead periods for that window by that day, the limb is unscored.

a mixed or partial reading Since GPT-4’s 352-day lead the top has passed from model to model at a median of about seven weeks, and from laboratory to laboratory at a median of about ten, with OpenAI on top 80.2 percent of the time, a laboratory median under the thirteen-week line, so the record so far leans to undermined.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Falls due

31 August 2028

Read on

Epoch AI’s capability index, and Epoch’s count of lead periods, in which any lead counts

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@misc{dryburgh-chapters-1-and-12-the-first-route-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{Chapters 1 and 12, the first route}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests/2028-1},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}