AI 2027

During the GPT-3 era there was plenty of organic text to scale into, and compute seemed to be the bottleneck. But we quickly exhausted it, and now we try other ideas - synthetic reasoning chains, or just plain synthetic text for example. But you can't do that fully in silico.

What is necessary in order to create new and valuable text is exploration and validation. LLMs can ideate very well, so we are covered on that side. But we can only automate validation in math and code, but not in other fields.

Real world validation thus becomes the bottleneck for progress. The world is jealously guarding its secrets and we need to spend exponentially more effort to pry them away, because the low hanging fruit has been picked long ago.

If I am right, it has implications on the speed of progress. Exponential friction of validation is opposing exponential scaling of compute. The story also says an AI could be created in secret, which is against the validation principle - we validate faster together, nobody can secretly outvalidate humanity. It's like blockchain, we depend on everyone else.

Thanks for this.

Even this is questionable, cause we're seeing it making forms and solving leetcodes, but no llm yet created a new approach, reduced existing unnecessary complexity (which we created mountains of), made something truly new in general. All they seem to do is rehash of millions of "mainstream" works, and AAA isn't mainstream. Cranking up the parameter count or the time of beating around the bush (aka cot) doesn't magically substitute for lack of a knowledge graph with thick enough edges, so creating a next-gen AAA video game is far out of scope of llm's abilities. They are stuck in 2020 office jobs and weekend open source tech, programming-wise.