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this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2026
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TechTakes
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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Here's that side-by-side comparison
Bioman has already pointed out the "Economic Value" numbers they are using for these tables are probably bullshit (based on self reported run-rate extrapolations that are deliberate distortions at best, based on VC valuation at worst). To add to this... the compute values are also probably bullshit. They are likely based on data center announcements and not confirmed totally complete data centers (Ed Zitron has ripped into how much bs there is in data center announcements). "Coding Time Horizon" is probably METR, which, while some of the best numbers for estimating actual AI improvement for practical purposes, are still really bad in several key ways. (They don't have enough human task performers for the longer duration tasks even if everything else was right, because they aren't, and there are several ways systematic bias could have leaked in and compelted distorted the constructed measure of task duration.)
"AI Software R&D Uplift" is the single most important category to their scenario of recursive self improvement... and they have it at a small fraction of what they estimated.
I took a quick look over the article again, this spreadsheet contains how they measure their metrics. "Compute" seems to be based off number of chips, which is probably in part based off data centres anyways
And apparently they have ditched METR and are now using "coding uplift (i.e., how much of a speedup AIs are providing to software engineers at AGI companies) and revenue."
Ed Zitron has also explained his suspicion that lots of GPUs are sitting around in warehouses waiting to be installed, in some cases sold (to juice NVIDIA's revenue) but not even shipped yet.
And I'm really skeptical speedup from AIs claimed by the LLM companies is in anyway related to reality.