People have completely rewritten what "scaling laws" were supposed to mean. Originally it was "pretraining a larger LLM on more data leads to more intelligence" (which was confusing "intelligence" with memorized knowledge/skills) Now it has somehow become "if we keep iterating on our models to refine their architecture, make them ever more sophisticated, and take advantage of ever more compute, we'll get better models". Which, duh...

LLMs run on a surprisingly old tech stack: gradient descent ‣ method for finding the minimum of a function ‣ Cauchy, 1847 (177 years ago) next-token prediction ‣ core learning task for language models ‣ Shannon, 1948 (76 years ago) autodiff backpropagation ‣ techniques for efficiently computing gradients ‣ Linnainmaa, 1970 (54 years ago) adam ‣ optimization algorithm ‣ Kingma et al, 2014 (10 years ago) transformer ‣ neural network architecture ‣ Vaswani et al, 2017 (7 years ago)

It's easy to explain away the significant risks entrepreneurs take in (many) attempts to realize a vision when you've never taken any risks worth recognizing.

People have too inflated sense of what it means to "ask an AI" about something. The AI are language models trained basically by imitation on data from human labelers. Instead of the mysticism of "asking an AI", think of it more as "asking the average data labeler" on the internet. Few caveats apply because e.g. in many domains (e.g. code, math, creative writing) the companies hire skilled data labelers (so think of it as asking them instead), and this is not 100% true when reinforcement learning is involved, though I have an earlier rant on how RLHF is just barely RL, and "actual RL" is still too early and/or constrained to domains that offer easy reward functions (math etc.). But roughly speaking (and today), you're not asking some magical AI. You're asking a human data labeler. Whose average essence was lossily distilled into statistical token tumblers that are LLMs. This can still be super useful ofc ourse. Post triggered by someone suggesting we ask an AI how to run the government etc. TLDR you're not asking an AI, you're asking some mashup spirit of its average data labeler.