> It remains unclear whether continuing to throw vast quantities of silicon and ever-bigger corpuses at the current generation of models will lead to human-equivalent capabilities. Massive increases in training costs and parameter count seem to be yielding diminishing returns. Or maybe this effect is illusory. Mysteries!
I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtually all known material. If we make it illegal for these companies to use copyrighted content without remuneration, either the task gets very expensive, indeed, or the corpus shrinks. We can certainly make the models larger, with more and more parameters, subject only to silicon’s ability to give us more transistors for RAM density and GPU parallelism. But it honestly feels like, without another “Attention is All You Need” level breakthrough, we’re starting to see the end of the runway.
I’m not even sure whether this is possible. The current corpus used for training includes virtually all known material. If we make it illegal for these companies to use copyrighted content without remuneration, either the task gets very expensive, indeed, or the corpus shrinks. We can certainly make the models larger, with more and more parameters, subject only to silicon’s ability to give us more transistors for RAM density and GPU parallelism. But it honestly feels like, without another “Attention is All You Need” level breakthrough, we’re starting to see the end of the runway.