Chapter 2, compute moved rather than stopped

The test. Falsified if the frontier of Epoch’s capability index keeps its slope in calendar 2027 and 2028, advancing at least 14 points in each year, the pace Epoch reported on 1 September 2026, while the growth of compute slows sharply everywhere at once in both years. That means Epoch’s frontier training-compute series growing less than twofold in each year, no offsetting rise in any post-training or inference estimate Epoch publishes for those years, and accelerator demand flat, NVIDIA’s reported Data Center revenue no higher in either of its fiscal years 2028 and 2029 than in the year before it. Every one of those conditions must hold together, and any one alone, frontier training compute slowing on its own included, leaves the claim standing. If Epoch has not published its index or its training-compute series for those years by the reading date, the test is unscored.

open Open. Since the first reasoning models of September 2024 the index’s frontier has advanced 14 points a year, Epoch’s reading of 1 September 2026.

From The AI Compute Race. Read the book

Falls due

31 March 2029

Read on

Epoch’s capability index, its frontier training-compute series and its post-training and inference estimates, and NVIDIA’s reported Data Center revenue

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-compute-moved-rather-than-stop-2026,
  author = {Dryburgh, Lee S.},
  title = {{Chapter 2, compute moved rather than stopped}},
  howpublished = {In \emph{The AI Compute Race}, DRYBURGH},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dryburgh.com/vol1/tests/2029-1},
  note = {Accessed 2026-11-01}
}