Assertion certainty 4/5 debate potential 2/5

Joseph: AI progress relies on a revenue-to-compute positive feedback loop

Nick Joseph · Anthropic Head of Pretraining on Scaling Laws, Compute, and the Future of AI · Y Combinator · Sep 30, 2025 · at 4:48

Nick Joseph, Head of Pre-Training at Anthropic, describes the economic engine driving continuous pre-training model scale over the past five years.

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“There's this positive feedback loop where you can train a model, You can use it to make something useful and sell that and get more money, use that to buy more compute, and then use that to train a better model. And we've sort of run that cycle over and over again over the past five years or so.”

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Prediction Not checkable as stated
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