A few dozen researchers drive most of the results at any top AI lab, and this power law in contribution is true across fields.
The speaker notes that within any given lab, a few dozen researchers drive about 80% of the results, a human power law evident across breast cancer research, subfields of math and physics, and entrepreneurship. ✦ AI generated
Speaker (investor, Alad? — Sarah G and Alad are the hosts; the sustained argument is attributed to one speaker voice, but names are not fully disambiguated in the transcript) · No Priors · 2026-08-06 · original ↗
starts at this moment · 22:03
one thing that I've noticed that is happening at some of the labs is that you know as compute becomes really the scarce resource it turns out that there's say a few dozen researchers that drive a lot of like 80% of the results at any given place which is a really interesting human power law right if you actually look at it in any field there's at most a few dozen people who drive the field you look at breast cancer research you look at certain sub fields of mathematics you Look at sub fields at physics. You look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem and founders like there's a handful of people, dozens of people who drive most progress. Um, and that also happens in AI research and you know increasingly computually provided to those people, right? And so I know some labs have slowed down on their hiring of researchers unless they're above a very very high bar because the cost isn't the researcher, it's the compute associated with the person.
verbatim transcript · starts at 22:03
21:55of them are driven by this belief system and potential burnout over time. uh part of it is going to be um you know one thing that I've noticed that is happening at some of the labs is that you know as compute becomes really the scarce resource it turns out that there's say a few dozen researchers that drive a lot of like 80% of the results at any given place which is a really
22:18interesting human power law right if you actually look at it in any field there's at most a few dozen people who drive the field you look at breast cancer research you look at certain sub fields of mathematics you Look at sub fields at physics. You look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem and founders like there's a handful of people, dozens of people who drive most progress. Um, and that also happens in AI research
22:41and you know increasingly computually provided to those people, right? And so I know some labs have slowed down on their hiring of researchers unless they're above a very very high bar because the cost isn't the researcher, it's the compute associated with the person. That's real where the real bottleneck is. I think there's this broader concept of like return on invested tokens like an ROI kind of metric which is if you have a certain
23:04token budget who do you give it to and why this is kind of like engineering back in the day right the internal tools teams at companies were always starved for resources cuz many at least tech companies would rather use the same engineers to build product than to build internal tools that would make other functions more productive that's why I think the death of SAS is a little bit
23:22overstated because why would you use tokens on a bunch of SAS stuff that you're not actually paying that much for per year relative to the outcome of those same tokens being invested against a core product or against some massive margin lift or some other thing, right? And so I think increasingly we've shifted from a world where people said, "Hey, everybody use AI and do whatever you want to, hey, we have to like measure
23:44spend and move more things to open source." And then I think the next wave is what are the projects and people that should actually get outsized pieces of a token budget and what is that return on investment? is this sort of next shift that's coming. It'll take some time though. I mean many people are still at like hey everybody try AI or whatever you know big enterprises.
24:02>> What do you think is the appropriate compute like token budget for a business or a human being 3 to 5 years from now? Should I look at it like rent? >> No. I mean it depends on what the budget is for what. I mean people forget too. Minecraft was like what was it five people 10 people when it was bought for billions of dollars by Microsoft. People