Frontier Labs Shift 90% of Compute to Post-Training and Inference

Reports suggest frontier AI labs now devote roughly 90% of compute to post-training and inference rather than pretraining, with insiders saying model gains come mainly from RL-able tasks. Commentators question lab profitability narratives as costs shift.

2026-10-06 ~ 2026-10-07 · 4 related posts

• ~90% of frontier lab compute now goes to post-training and inference — IanAndrewsDC · 2026-10-06
• "Pre-training is now just a warmup": post-training RL and inference take over compute — joeddav · 2026-10-07
• ~90% of frontier lab compute now goes to post-training and inference — teortaxesTex · 2026-10-07
• ~90% of frontier lab compute now goes to post-training and inference as pretraining corpus exhausts — rbhar90 · 2026-10-07