# The End of AI Exponentiation: Fluttering Inside and Outside AI Bubble

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.05894 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.05894/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 5 of its 35 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 5 Sep 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [A Survey of Frontiers in LLM Reasoning: Inference Scaling, Learning to Reason, and Agentic Systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.09037/) (2025)
- [Mapping global dynamics of benchmark creation and saturation in artificial intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.04592/) (2022)
- [Computing Power and the Governance of Artificial Intelligence](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.08797/) (2024)
- [From AGI to ASI](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.12683/) (2026)
- [AI Compute Architecture and Evolution Trends](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.21394/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

The exponentiation of Artificial intelligence (AI) in the recent past has entered a transformative era that has been driven by the growth in large language models (LLMs), large-scale compute infrastructures, and autonomous reasoning systems. However, the rapid acceleration of AI has increasingly shown technological, societal, economic, ethical and infrastructural challenges associated with peak data limitations, rising computational demands, synthetic data recursion, valuation inflation, and societal instability. The traditional scaling paradigms that have powered the modern AI systems are gradually encountering friction in sustaining continuous exponential growth. This paper views ``the end of AI exponentiation,'' thus exploring how it flutters inside and outside the bubble, where instability emerges within the AI ecosystem through compute and data-center races, speculative investments, and the rat-race toward superintelligence, and outside the ecosystem through labor disruption, governance concerns, public uncertainty, and geopolitical acceleration surrounding future intelligent systems and infrastructures globally.