Dominic Rigby

Burning Out: An Essay on Working in AI

Date read: 3rd November 2025

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Key Points

• The window for entering the AI race is closing as frontier performance races forward.
• Researchers are therefore working insanely hard to get their companies in the race (and out of passion).
• It is difficult to know how progress is doing
• Three core ingredients to training cutting edge LLMs:
  1. Internal tools recipes, code-bases etc. Often in house.
  2. Resources: compute and data
  3. Personnel
• Difficult for companies to catch up and get involved in this race:
  • Researchers often want to innovate when we should be grinding out somethign we know can work.
  • Low hanging fruit is now more expensive and difficult to achieve.
  • Amount of knowledge required to make this work is massive per person.