Prolific is a Business Reporter client New research shows the biggest bottleneck in AI development isn’t cost or compute – it’s clear communication. When we asked more than 120 AI practitioners what’s slowing them down, cost ranked last. Not the compute bill, not the annotation budget, not the price of expert time. What topped the list was something the industry has spent far less time thinking about: the ability to communicate clearly with the humans being asked to shape these systems. That finding cuts against years of received wisdom about what AI development actually costs. It also points towards a problem that no amount of infrastructure spending can fix. When we surveyed those practitioners, spanning AI engineers, researchers, product managers and business leaders across organisations actively building and deploying AI systems, the top bottleneck for advancing AI safety and alignment wasn’t compute. It wasn’t theoretical gaps in how we understand these models either.…