Noam Brown: why research bottlenecks may slow the loop

‘I think that we do get bottlenecked by certain limitations that are not bottlenecks of intelligence’

EXCERPT

BROWN: "I think that we do see a speed up, and I think we see a significant speed up. Um, but I don't think it's like an overnight intelligence explosion that we go like 100X faster because I think that we do get bottlenecked by certain, certain limitations that are not bottlenecks of intelligence. It's running experiments, it's running experiments serially because they take a while to either train new models or to get the results. Um, it's having the GPUs to run those experiments. So it's unclear how much faster things go. I definitely think they go a lot faster. Um, and, uh, to be clear, like considering how fast things go- are going now on an, on an exponential, if that exponential is like 3X faster, that is, that is massive. But, uh, but there's a big difference between that and like 100X faster. Yeah, yeah."

Source: Dwarkesh Patel · Sep 17, 2026 · 43s clip