Issue 1: The Scaling Bet

Draft v3 · October 11, 2026 · What changed

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The leader

Ten voices take three roads to more capable AI. Set side by side, they share one input: the data center.

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The voices

Keep scaling 4 voices

Push today’s methods further with more compute, data, and capital.

01 The bet at the end of the curve Dario Amodei
02 What $1.4 trillion is supposed to buy Sam Altman
03 Scale and scaffold Demis Hassabis
04 The second axis Noam Brown

Different training 3 voices

Train differently: change what models learn from, or how, before adding compute.

01 Sutton and the Bitter Lesson Richard Sutton
02 The recipe is exhausted; the curve is not Ilya Sutskever
03 Pattern matching, not reasoning Gary Marcus

Different machine 3 voices

Build a different kind of model for the compute to run.

01 The architecture that capex forgot Albert Gu
02 The bet against the language model Yann LeCun
03 Scaling isn’t enough François Chollet

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PAYBACK

A fictional AI economy with rules taken from the real one. Run a frontier AI lab and see whether the bet pays back.

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Issue 1 · Draft v3

deslop.media editorial. Issue 1, Draft v3, first published October 10, 2026. Reporting current through October 2026. Use the flags on this page to report an error or a disagreement. Changes to the issue are listed on the changes page.