So after all these hours talking about AI, in these last five minutes I am going to talk about: Horses. Engines, steam engines, were invented in 1700. And what followed was 200 years of steady improvement, with engines getting 20% better a decade. For the first 120 years of
But enough about horses. Let's talk about chess! Folks started tracking computer chess in 1985. And for the next 40 years, computer chess would improve by 50 Elo per year. That meant in 2000, a human grandmaster could expect to win 90% of their games against a computer. But
Enough about chess! Let's talk about AI. Capital expenditure on AI has been pretty steady. Right now we're - globally - spending the equivalent of 2% of US GDP on AI datacenters each year. That number seems to have steadily been doubling over the past few years. And it seems
But from my perspective, from equivalence to me, it hasn't been steady at all. I was one of the first researchers hired at Anthropic. This pink line, back in 2024, was a large part of my job. Answer technical questions for new hires. Back then, me and other old-timers were
Now. Answering those questions was only part of my job. But while it took horses decades to be overcome, and chess masters years, it took me all of six months to be surpassed. Surpassed by a system that costs one thousand times less than I do. A system that costs less, per
And so I find myself thinking a lot about horses, nowadays. In 1920, there were 25 million horses in the United States, 25 million horses totally ambivalent to two hundred years of progress in mechanical engines. And not very long after, 93 percent of those horses had
This was a five-minute lightning talk given over the summer of 2025 to round out a small workshop. All opinions are my own and not those of my employer. A better formatted version is here: