“Trends in Economic Inputs to AI” by Jeffrey Heninger

Introduction

Frontier AI companies have seen rapid increases in the economic resources they have available to pursue AI progress. At some companies, the number of employees is at least doubling every year, and the amount of capital received is tripling every year. It is unclear whether this growth is sustainable. Is the revenue growing faster than the capital requirements? If it is, will revenue catch up before the capital available for AI investments runs out?

I do not think that there is enough publicly available data to answer these questions. It is plausible that frontier AI companies will run into significant economic limitations before Metaculus's forecast for AGI in July 2033.

Similar Work

• Epoch has an estimate for how various inputs to AI training runs could scale through 2030. Their work is distinct from this post because they focus on technical inputs (electric power, chip manufacturing, data, and latency) [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Introduction

(00:56) Similar Work

(01:37) Limitations

(03:24) Employees

(03:44) Sources

(05:11) Data

(06:39) Projections

(09:01) Capital

(09:25) Sources

(10:29) Data

(11:46) Projections

(14:51) Revenue

(15:12) Sources

(16:14) OpenAI

(18:52) Anthropic

(20:05) Other Frontier AI Companies

(21:01) Epoch's Estimates

(22:11) Conclusion

(23:31) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW3nw5GYfnF9oNyp4/trends-in-economic-inputs-to-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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