To 10x the compute, you might need to 10x the funding, which AI capable of automating AI research can secure in other ways. Smaller-than-frontier experiments don’t need unusually giant datacenters (which can be challenging to build quickly), they only need a lot of regular datacenters and the funding to buy their time. Currently there are millions of H100 chips out there in the world, so 100K H100 chips in a giant datacenter is not the relevant anchor for the scale of smaller experiments, the constraint is funding.
To 10x the compute, you might need to 10x the funding, which AI capable of automating AI research can secure in other ways. Smaller-than-frontier experiments don’t need unusually giant datacenters (which can be challenging to build quickly), they only need a lot of regular datacenters and the funding to buy their time. Currently there are millions of H100 chips out there in the world, so 100K H100 chips in a giant datacenter is not the relevant anchor for the scale of smaller experiments, the constraint is funding.