Last month, AI founders and investors told TechCrunch that we’re now in the “second era of scaling laws,” noting how established methods of improving AI models were showing diminishing returns. One promising new method they suggested could keep gains was “test-time scaling,” which seems to be what’s behind the performance of OpenAI’s o3 model — but it comes with drawbacks of its own. Much of the AI world took the announcement of OpenAI’s o3 model as proof that AI scaling progress has not “hit a ...