What if scaling fails to hold at a certain point? Whether that is a steep or gradual dropoff in returns. What happens to the empires of accumulated compute? How much value do they immediately lose once the returns to scaling ceiling is reached?

If/when this happens the value generation will be focused on application and the training compute will be shifted towards inference.

At this point I think it'll be a lot easier to find out what happens then and what to do next if you're using the frontier AI