In 2025, OpenAI reportedly spent around US$19.2 billion on training. Not on marketing. Not on salaries. On training.
That should get every CEO’s attention.
One of the biggest discoveries of the AI age is surprisingly simple: the more training you give intelligence, the better it performs. As Anthropic co-founder Jack Clark observed, every time more compute is allocated to training AI systems, they get better.
The return on training is enormous. Call it ROT: Return on Training.
The principle is hardly new. Olympic coaches understand it. No athlete wins a gold medal by accident. Performance follows training hours. The arts understand it too. Concert pianists, actors and musicians spend years refining their craft. The military has known it for centuries. Evan the Vatican, human history’s most successful organisation, typically invests around eight years training its priests (influencers) before sending them into the world.
When it comes to performance in sport, entertainment, science or sales, the world can be divided into two groups: the elite whose strategy is DAILY training, and everyone-else.
Yet many businesses still treat training as a cost rather than an investment.
Notice where most CEOs come from: finance, operations, sales, marketing or engineering. Very few come from training. That tells us something about how organisations value human development.
AI may change that.
The lesson from both artificial intelligence and human intelligence is the same:
if you want performance x10, invest in training x10.
The future belongs to organisations that take the strategic investment in elite training seriously.
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From the last page 146, The x10 Memeplex: Multiply Your Business By Ten by Michael Hewitt-Gleeson, 2000, Pearson Education Australia (click to download the x10 book).
Whatever you train at every day will get better – operate to learn is our MO but maybe it should be: operate to train – either way, performance goes up and in my experience, there is no limit, meaning it does not top out and just keeps getting better
10x performance and 10x training makes sense if we really want to show up at our best, overcome, experience victory, or simply want to feel good about ourselves… knowing we gave our best!