Introduction

Frontier AI companies have seen rapid increases in the economic resources they have available to pursue AI progress. At some companies, the number of employees is at least doubling every year, and the amount of capital received is tripling every year. It is unclear whether this growth is sustainable. Is the revenue growing faster than the capital requirements? If it is, will revenue catch up before the capital available for AI investments runs out?

I do not think that there is enough publicly available data to answer these questions. It is plausible that frontier AI companies will run into significant economic limitations before Metaculus's forecast for AGI in July 2033.

Similar Work

Epoch has an estimate for how various inputs to AI training runs could scale through 2030. Their work is distinct from this post because they focus on technical inputs (electric power, chip manufacturing, data, and latency) [...]

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Outline:

(00:10) Introduction

(00:56) Similar Work

(01:37) Limitations

(03:24) Employees

(03:44) Sources

(05:11) Data

(06:39) Projections

(09:01) Capital

(09:25) Sources

(10:29) Data

(11:46) Projections

(14:51) Revenue

(15:12) Sources

(16:14) OpenAI

(18:52) Anthropic

(20:05) Other Frontier AI Companies

(21:01) Epoch's Estimates

(22:11) Conclusion

(23:31) Acknowledgements

The original text contained 8 footnotes which were omitted from this narration.

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First published:
September 11th, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/KW3nw5GYfnF9oNyp4/trends-in-economic-inputs-to-ai

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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Images from the article:

Figure 1: Estimates for the number of employees at frontier AI companies vs time. All of the companies have some estimates, but only OpenAI, Anthropic, and DeepMind have enough data for me to include a trendline. DeepMind has long had the most employees, but they have recently been passed by OpenAI.

Figure 2: Estimates for the total capital received by three of the frontier AI companies vs time. OpenAI has more capital, but Anthropic and xAI are growing faster.

Figure 3: Revenue of OpenAI’s nonprofit and for profit entities vs time. OpenAI’s projections for 2029 are substantially below the current trend.

Figure 4: Revenue of Anthropic vs time, according to three different sources. There is huge uncertainty.

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“Trends in Economic Inputs to AI” by Jeffrey Heninger

LessWrong (30+ Karma)