✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

What's going on with AI progress and trends? (As of 5/2025)

redwoodresearch.substack.com · 2,776 words · saved by 1 readers

AI progress is driven by improved algorithms and additional compute for training runs. Understanding what is going on with these trends and how they are currently driving progress is helpful for understanding the future of AI. In this post, I'll share a wide range of general takes on this topic as well as open questions. Be warned that I'm quite uncertain about a bunch of this! This post will assume some familiarity with what is driving AI progress, specifically it will assume you understand the following concepts: pre-training, RL, scaling laws, effective compute. Epoch reports a trend of frontier training compute increasing by 4.5x per year. My best guess is that the future trend will be slower, maybe more like 3.5x per year (or possibly much lower) for a few reasons: While Grok 3 is basically on trend for the 4.5x per year trend, other AI companies seemingly haven't released an AI with much more compute than GPT-4 (at least, an AI they actually keep deployed, GPT-4.5 is going to be

What's going on with AI progress and trends? (As of 5/2025) My views on what's driving AI progress and where it's headed. Ryan Greenblatt May 03, 2025 16 2 Share AI progress is driven by improved algorithms and additional compute for training runs. Understanding what is going on with these trends and how they are currently driving progress is helpful for understanding the future of AI. In this post, I'll share a wide range of general takes on this topic as well as open questions. Be warned that I'm quite uncertain about a bunch of this! This post will assume some familiarity with what is drivi

Explore this link on the map →

related reading