The speaker's framework represents uncertainty about the compute required with a probability distribution across compute levels, bounded above softly and below by compute already used.

“You can start to smear out your probability mass over this dimension of compute.”

“And so you sort of have a soft upper bound,”

“and then you have, of course, a lower bound,”

“which is the amount that we already have done. We clearly haven't done it right now with this amount of compute.”

“And so that gives you this smeared probability distribution over compute.”