The Intelligence Explosion May Come Sooner: Longer Reasoning Makes Models Smarter, and the Cost of Thought Is Crashing

This essay argues that the intelligence explosion may happen before superclusters are finished. Three reasons: 1) Model capability scales with test-time compute; Noam Brown says models can improve for weeks. 2) The cost of reasoning is collapsing—OpenAI halved costs, Vera Rubin achieves 10x tokens per megawatt. 3) Breakthroughs are already here: an OpenAI model disproved an Erdős conjecture, Fable 5 helped find a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture, and GPT-5.6 SOL used massive inference to find a zero-day. Persistence is key. Sam Altman talks about directing enormous compute to the hardest problems and getting results beyond entire teams.

• OpenAI
• Reasoning
• agents
• Efficiency
• test-time compute
• intelligence explosion