Ryan Greenblatt corrects estimate: software must improve 2.5x faster for 2x overall AI progress (~3.8x)
RyanGreenblatt · x · 2026-11-06
Alignment researcher Ryan Greenblatt issued a correction to his earlier estimate about the composition of AI progress. He had assumed roughly 2/3 of AI progress comes from software improvements and claimed that doubling overall AI progress requires software to improve 3x faster. After LessWrong user Tejas flagged the math error in parallel, Greenblatt confirmed the correct figure is 2.5x faster software progress, yielding an overall estimate of 3.8x rather than 4.5x. The mistake came from not accounting for continued progress from training compute growth in the calculation. Such estimates feed into AGI timeline debates and compute-vs-algorithm attribution analyses.
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