I originally wrote this just for myself but thought I'd share it in case others find it useful. Sharing rough notes in the spirit of not letting perfect be the enemy of the good. This was written in early May 2025.

In this post I collect evidence and forecasts regarding recent and future trends in software and compute progress. I also make my own forecasts which inform an updated version of AI 2027's timelines forecast (more to come on these and further updates). These forecasts are rough and uncertain.

I especially build on this post.

Evidence and forecasts regarding the recent rate of software progress (and share vs. compute)

EvidenceEstimateCaveats, reasoning, etc.

Compute efficiency increase at fixed performance

Epoch paper: Analyzing a dataset of LLM performance on Wikitext and Penn Treebank (source)

2.5-2.8x/year

Average efficiency increase reported in the paper (compute needed to reach same performance halving every 8-9 [...]

The original text contained 6 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
June 26th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ATSyAdBnxxDDAwhgu/recent-and-forecasted-rates-of-software-and-hardware

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Recent and forecasted rates of software and hardware progress” by elifland 02:10 Share

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

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“Recent and forecasted rates of software and hardware progress” by elifland