Governance1–3 hoursGuided
Explain compute governance to a friend
Why do so many governance proposals focus on chips? Read one key paper and write a jargon-free explainer for someone outside tech.
Reading & writingView project
GovernanceTechnicalA few weeksIntermediateFree
Are consumer GPUs a problem for export controls?
Export controls target data-centre chips. But consumer hardware keeps getting better, and frontier-level performance reaches it within about a year. Update the analysis with the latest hardware.
Download PDFDataReading & writing
Why it matters
If gaming hardware can get around the controls, policymakers need to know by how much.
Output: An updated quantitative analysis.
Getting started
0 of 5 done-
Read IAPS’s report and Epoch AI’s consumer-GPU gap analysis.
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Collect specs for current consumer and data-centre chips from public sources.
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Estimate what a cluster of consumer chips could train, and at what cost.
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Compare with current export-control thresholds.
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Write up your conclusion and its biggest uncertainty.
All steps done
Share what you made, then try another project. The PDF version has room for notes.
Related projects
Governance1–3 hoursGuided
Plot AI compute trends with real data
Download Epoch AI’s free dataset of notable AI models, chart training compute over time in Python, estimate how fast it grows, and count how many models cross the EU AI Act’s compute threshold.
CodeDataView project
GovernanceA few weeksAdvanced
Re-check “catch-up algorithmic progress”
MIRI TGT argued that catching up to a given capability level gets cheaper by roughly 60× per year. Re-run the analysis with newer models and test how robust that number is.
DataView project
Further reading
- Are Consumer GPUs a Problem for US Export Controls? (opens in a new tab)Reading
- LLM Performance on Consumer Hardware (opens in a new tab)Reading
- Frontier AI performance becomes accessible on consumer hardware within a year (opens in a new tab)Reading
- Basic facts about GPUs (opens in a new tab)Reading
- Epoch AI hardware data (opens in a new tab)Reading
Related mentored projects
- Assessing Taiwan’s Global Position for Transformative AI (opens in a new tab)SPARDavid Sanchez Garcia, Kevin Chen · GovAI Summer Fellow / Centre for the Governance of AI
- Mitigating Intentional Loss of Control Risk Through Interoperability Standards for Agentic AI (opens in a new tab)SPARKevin Kohler · Simon Institute, UN University, AGI Preparedness Institute
- Update the AI Safety Fieldmap (opens in a new tab)SPARJoseph Kostousov, Harry Waterman · TAISI / Generator Residency