Artificial Jagged Intelligence as Uneven Optimization Energy Allocation Capability Concentration, Redistribution, and Optimization Governance

As exponential compute scaling continues, will the capabilities of frontier AI models outstrip what is accessible to developers on a small fixed budget? Or will capabilities converge, with "meek models inheriting the earth"? Building on Gundlach et al. (2025b), we show that the answer depends on how we value and measure AI capabilities. We discuss conventional performance measures and show that, while validation loss shows a shrinking gap, on other metrics frontier models grow their lead forever. Classifying performance metrics by their functional forms in relation to training (and inference) compute, we provide tight mathematical conditions for determining which metrics favor meek models, and show that bounded performance metrics always do. But careful interpretation of performance metrics is essential: we show that many common bounded metrics have closely-related counterpart metrics that are unbounded (and vice versa). Determining the apt metric in a domain is a prerequisite for policy, since bounded and unbounded metrics may suggest opposing policy responses. If a particular capability -- like software engineering, synthetic biology, or rhetorical persuasiveness -- is unbounded when measured in the terms we care about, frontier-level capability will likely be concentrated in the hands of a few wealthy actors. Conversely, if that capability is instead bounded, frontier-level capabilities proliferate through meek models into the hands of the many.

As artificial intelligence systems increasingly rely on distributed and collaborative training, the energy footprint of these processes becomes a shared responsibility. Modern AI training often unfolds across heterogeneous compute nodes-ranging from cloud clusters to edge devices-whose energy availability is spatially and temporally variable. At the same time, renewable energy grids experience growing levels of excess generation, creating opportunities to align computational workloads with low-carbon energy supply. In this work, we develop a game-theoretic model of carbon-aware AI training in which autonomous agents strategically choose whether to participate and how intensively to train under limited renewable energy availability. Each agent balances diminishing learning returns, rewards for remaining within green-energy budgets, and penalties for grid consumption. While our framework applies broadly to distributed AI training, we examine Federated Learning as a representative case study due to its decentralized structure and flexible scheduling. We analyze equilibrium existence, efficiency, and adaptive dynamics, and provide simulation evidence that appropriately designed incentives can eliminate grid-based energy usage while preserving model performance. Our findings demonstrate how incentive-compatible training mechanisms can enhance energy efficiency and sharply reduce carbon emissions under renewable-energy constraints.

Large language model (LLM) training is among the fastest-growing sources of electricity demand in modern data centers, and power availability is a primary bottleneck to continued AI infrastructure growth. Making the power consumption of these workloads flexible could unlock additional power for AI growth, limit increases in electricity prices, and improve the utilization of existing grid infrastructure. However, to realize this flexibility, we must first understand how the performance of training workloads changes when GPU power is reduced. This paper presents the first systematic characterization of \emph{job power elasticity} (the sensitivity of throughput to power reductions) in LLM training. To quantify elasticity, we introduce the \emph{Power Flexibility Index (PFI)}, a normalized metric that quantifies the performance cost of power reductions and provides a control primitive for SLA-aware power flexibility. We collect data from 131 LLM training runs on H200 (plus 24 H200 validation runs and 34 matched H100 runs), including both dense and mixture-of-experts models, pretraining and fine-tuning tasks, and up to 32 GPUs. We find that LLM training jobs exhibit substantial but variable power elasticity, and we identify telemetry signals that predict PFI at runtime. Finally, we demonstrate that PFI-aware power allocation maximizes total tokens/second throughput under power constraints. Under a 30% power reduction, PFI-aware power allocation recovers ~1.5k tokens/s per job, 63% of the performance gap between an equal-weight allocation and an oracle with perfect information. Our results establish power elasticity as a measurable property of training jobs and provide a foundation for power-aware, grid-responsive AI infrastructure.