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The real data wall is billions of years of evolution

dynomight.net · 1,950 words · saved by 2 readers

Careful with those human analogies

Say you have a time machine. You can only use it once, to send a single idea back to 2005. If you wanted to speed up the development of AI, what would you send back? Many people suggest attention or transformers. But I’m convinced that the answer is “brute-force”—to throw as much data at the problem as possible. AI has recently been improving at a harrowing rate. If trends hold, we are in for quite a show. But some suggest AI progress might falter due to a “data wall”. Current language models are trained on datasets fast approaching “all the text, ever”. What happen when it runs out? Many…

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