Ex-Google Brain researcher: key algorithmic wins were found under 1e20 FLOPs, then scaled to 1e25
_arohan_ · x · 2026-09-07
Former Google Brain member arohan notes that many innovations from his Google Brain era that made it into frontier models — now credited as 'algorithmic progress' — were discovered with less than 1e20 FLOPs of compute and only later scaled to 1e25 FLOPs. The observation implies major algorithmic breakthroughs don't require massive compute; small-scale experiments can yield frontier-shaping methods.
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