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 PatelEvidence 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 Kokotajlo— Dwarkesh PatelCreated: 8/11/2026, 6:58:13 AM
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