Welcome to "Intelligence from the Community"， our Sunday format where a selected author from the Superintelligence community publishes an original essay or analysis. The idea hasn't changed： some of you are researchers， some are operators， some are engineers building the systems everyone else writes about. That expertise deserves space.

This week's piece comes from Amish Regmi， an AI engineer at Klaviyo who previously built inference infrastructure and agentic systems at Amazon. Amish tackles something that has been bugging me for months： the way "AI is exponential" gets thrown around as if it were a single， self-evident fact. It rarely comes with the numbers that would make it testable. What is the base of the exponent？ What is the doubling time？ Which curve are we even talking about？ Amish goes through the data， separates confirmed steep exponents from fast hillclimbs and broken instruments， and arrives at a conclusion that is more useful than the slogan： the transition will be governed by mismatched slopes.