Compute Leverage

Eight of the eleven links a training run passes through can stall it at eighteen months

The reach of the check. Every link a frontier training run passes through, in the order it passes them. A solid mark is a link where one holder can stall the run for a year or more; a hollow mark is one where it cannot, because a production alternative already exists. For each of the eight that can stall it, the bands show what the check over that layer is able to do — refuse supply, decide who is served, or both. The two are different powers and the figure keeps them apart deliberately: a rule that can forbid a shipment to the wrong buyer is not a rule that can put a lab at the front of the queue. What is drawn from the substrate is the holder, the verdict and the KIND of check; what each kind of check can do is Scrutica’s reading of that kind, written once and applied to every layer that has it — it is not a field in the record, and a reader who disagrees with the reading can see exactly which rows it moves. No band is drawn for the three links that are not chokepoints: a check over something nobody is waiting on is not a finding.

Training a frontier model runs through a long supply chain: the software the chips are designed on, the handful of machines that can pattern them, the fabs that print them, the packaging that fuses them, and the power to run it all. At eight points along that chain a single holder can stall the work for a year or more. Every one of the eight sits under some check — which is the reassuring half of the finding, and not the half that matters. The check that reaches seven of them is export-control law, and what export-control law does is decide where a holder may sell. It does not decide that a holder must sell, or to whom. For a lab trying to field the next run, that second question is the whole question, and exactly one of the eight chokepoints has anything standing over it that can answer it: grid power, where the holders are public bodies running a queue.