Why AI labs are hitting a wall before scaling up
Evaluating AI models now consumes more compute than training them—flipping the entire efficiency game.
Summary
- Evaluation (testing model quality) now rivals or exceeds training compute for frontier models, creating a hidden cost nobody predicted
- Labs must choose: spend months evaluating before deployment, or ship faster and evaluate in production (both are expensive)
- This inverts the old bottleneck: we have the compute to train, but lack the *certainty* to deploy
- Smaller teams and open-source developers get priced out—eval infrastructure is capital-intensive and proprietary
- The bottleneck shifts from "can we build it?" to "can we trust it?" and nobody has a cheap answer yet

















































