Chapters 1 and 12, the wager

The test. Falsified if both of two things hold. Rivals are still reproducing each advance within fourteen months, the top of the historical four-to-fourteen-month envelope, so that a faster catch-up counts too. The public record still shows the leader’s generation time, the time one generation of models takes to produce the next, at months rather than weeks, which chapters 1 and 12 read as more than eight weeks between successive frontier releases. The lag alone undermines the second route, and the generation time alone falsifies nothing.

a mixed or partial reading Not established. The lag is inside fourteen months and the generation time is months rather than weeks, so both conditions hold on the record so far, and the test is read on 31 August 2028; no regime change, a lead widening rather than turning over, has been observed. The book does not assert the wager, as the preamble says, and keeps the test because the buildout is priced as if it were true.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Falls due

31 August 2028

Read on

The lag on Epoch AI’s count of the China lag, as the Scorecard’s China-lag row reads it, and the generation time on the interval between successive frontier models from the leading laboratory, by the release dates Epoch AI’s capability index lists

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@misc{dryburgh-chapters-1-and-12-the-wager-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{Chapters 1 and 12, the wager}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests/2028-3},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}