‘Overworked, underpaid’ humans train Google’s AI

There's nontrivial historical precedent for this exact playbook: when a new paradigm (Lisp machines and GOFAI search, GPU backprop, softmax self-attention) is scaling fast, a lot of promises get made, a lot of national security money gets involved, and AI Summer is just balmy.

But the next paradigm breakthrough is hard to forecast, and the current paradigm's asymptote is just as hard to predict, so it's +EV to say "tomorrow" and "forever".

When the second becomes clear before the first, you turk and expert label like it's 1988 and pray that the next paradigm breakthrough is soon, you bridge the gap with expert labeling and compute until it works or you run out of money and the DoD guy stops taking your calls. AI Winter is cold.

And just like Game of Thrones, no I mean no one, not Altman, not Amodei, not Allah Most Blessed knows when the seasons in A Song of Math and Grift will change.