The bottleneck to AI progress is not primarily researcher headcount (only 20-30 people on core pre-training teams at major labs, and companies don't aggressively hire more PhDs despite having capital), but rather a combination of compute resources, research taste, and serial speed of thinking; parallel multiplication of researcher count has diminishing returns.

causalpending

Speaker

Dwarkesh Patel

Evidence Quote

there's maybe 20 to 30 people on the core pre-training team that's discovering all these algorithmic breakthroughs

Source

AI 2027: month-by-month model of intelligence explosion — Scott Alexander & Daniel KokotajloDwarkesh Patel
Created: 8/11/2026, 6:58:13 AM

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