Why frontier labs are scaling-pilled

Investors underwrite scaling laws because the alternative (having an Einstein discover better algorithms) is high variance What would it take to make progress towards general intelligence, where general stands for any problem that might arise in our world? Since our world is big and open-ended, the quest for general intelligence becomes a quest for solving more and more problems, including even the long tail and arcane ones. In fact, many people see AGI as the point when an AI model is able to solve any problem that any other human or a group of humans is able to solve. Compute is scalable search for patterns The famous bitter lesson essay starts with this assertion: The biggest lesson that can be read from 70 years of AI research is that general methods that leverage computation are ultimately the most effective, and by a large margin To solve any problem, you have to have insights into how the relevant domain works. For example, long before neural networks took over the world of…