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Intellectual Progress in 2025

beren.io · 4,380 words · saved by 1 readers

It is now 2026 and we are half way through the decade of the 2020s. If we think back to the halcyon days of January 2020 certainly a lot has happened, especially in AI1. The first half of the decade has essentially been the discovery and then incredible exploitation of...

It is now 2026 and we are half way through the decade of the 2020s. If we think back to the halcyon days of January 2020 certainly a lot has happened, especially in AI 1 . The first half of the decade has essentially been the discovery and then incredible exploitation of scaling . We have scaled the compute and data poured into these models by many orders of magnitude, ‘racing through the OOMs’. As we come into 2026 there are a few OOMs still left to go but the end here is clearly in sight. It has become fairly clear that pretraining on webtext alone does not lead to AGI, which was the common

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