The AI scaling story is typically told through model architecture or GPU count, but Anjney Midha argues the real bottleneck is now infrastructure utilization and community alignment.
At Google, 95% utilization was considered an outage, because the marginal cost of idle compute was dwarfed by the cost of losing a job.
At frontier labs today, the opposite problem dominates: companies hoard compute to preserve optionality, leading to compounding waste.
DeepMind hoarding unpublished research creates a similar negative externality — knowledge that could accelerate the entire field sits locked away.
The tension is that the next phase of AI requires not just more FLOPs, but a fundamentally different market structure for how compute is allocated and governed.