We're still in phase 1, where human-directed improvement has the highest potential. Papers are still getting published and the cells interlinked. (I'm not sure

We're still in phase 1, where human-directed improvement has the highest potential. Papers are still getting published and the cells interlinked. (I'm not sure the scaling picture is at all clear, given that papers like this can turn up casually with 15x savings, but let's put that aside for now.) Phase 2 begins when patents break stealth, unsettling the picture. If some patent impairs research or operations in IP-solid countries, the lower-level stuff might move to local inference, and maybe some minor Pirate Bay-style outfits. Phase 3 begins when the costly research goes dark (well, darker.) Everyone is Apple now. The research papers are replaced by white papers, then by PR communiqués. Phase 4 begins when the AI AI researchers take over. The old AI researchers turn into their managers. Some of the path is compute-bound. Some of it is IP-, luck-, and genius-bound.