Ege Erdil

So you had in the, you know, in the early period, people were kind of, you know, solving gameplay on specific games, on very complex games.

And, you know, that happened 2015 to maybe 2020 and Go and chess and Dota and other games.

And then you had maybe, you know, sophisticated language capabilities that were unlocked with these large language models.

and maybe kind of advanced abstract reasoning.

And coding and maybe math, that was maybe another big such capability that got unlocked.

And so maybe there are a couple of these big unlocks that happened over the past 10 years

But that happened on the order of once every three years or so, or maybe one every three orders of magnitude of compute scaling.

And then you might ask the question, how many more such competencies might we need to unlock in order to be able to have an AI system that can match the capabilities of humans across the board, maybe specifically just on remote work tasks?

And so then you might ask, well, maybe you need kind of coherence over very long horizons, or you need kind of agency and autonomy, or maybe you need multimodal, kind of full multimodal kind of understanding, just like a human would.

And then you ask the question, okay, how long might that take?

And so you can think about, well, just in terms of calendar years, the previous unlocks took about, you get one every three years or so.

But of course that previous period coincided with this rapid scale-up of the amount of compute that we use for training.

So we went through maybe 9 or 10 orders of magnitude since AlexNet compared to the biggest models we have today.

And we're getting to a level where it's becoming harder and harder to scale up compute.

And we've done some extrapolations and some analysis looking at specific constraints, like energy or GPU production.

And based on that, it looks like we might have

maybe three or four orders of magnitude of scaling left, and then you're really spending a pretty sizable fraction or a non-trivial fraction of world output on just building up data centers, energy infrastructure, fabs.

Which is already like 2% of GDP, right?

I mean, currently it's less than 2%.

Even leading edge is pretty small.