The Road to AGI: Tracking Compute Scaling, Reasoning Models, and the 2029 Horizon

The transition from narrow predictive language models to autonomous reasoning systems marks the most consequential pivot in technological history. As compute clusters surpass the 100,000-accelerator threshold and test-time reasoning replaces raw parameter scale as the primary frontier, the timeline for Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) is compressing faster than even optimistic roadmaps projected.

1. The Paradigm Shift to Inference-Time Reasoning

For the past five years, the reigning hypothesis in frontier AI was brute-force scaling. However, research labs have pivoted toward test-time compute—allowing neural architectures to perform internal chain-of-thought verification, backtrack through erroneous reasoning branches, and simulate outcome spaces before emitting an answer.