Are faster AI researchers a good progress metric? One researcher argues no
ZhongRuiqi · x · 2026-11-09
Replying to Ajeya Cotra's post on AI accelerating AI R&D, ZhongRuiqi argues that "speeding up individual AI researchers" is not a meaningful metric since marginal utility of labor drops as teams grow — researchers spend more time aligning internally and competing for compute. He suggests a more predictive metric: how much AI can make AI systems themselves run faster, e.g. via kernel engineering.
Related event: Debate: Is Accelerating Individual Researchers a Useful Metric?(2 posts)→
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