I think it’s interesting because once you read it, it’s obvious that AS was going to happen and the approach was scaling (given that OA5 had scaled from a similar starting point, cf ‘the bitter lesson’), but at the time, no one in DRL/ML circles even noticed the talk—I only found out about that Vinyals talk after AS came out and everyone was reading back through Vinyals’s stuff and noticed he’d said something at Blizzcon (and then after a bunch of searching, I finally found that transcript, since the video is still paywalled by Blizzard). Oh well!
Thanks! I’ve updated the version on our site (https://aiimpacts.org/the-unexpected-difficulty-of-comparing-alphastar-to-humans/) and I’m working on updating the post here on LW.
I think it’s interesting because once you read it, it’s obvious that AS was going to happen and the approach was scaling (given that OA5 had scaled from a similar starting point, cf ‘the bitter lesson’), but at the time, no one in DRL/ML circles even noticed the talk—I only found out about that Vinyals talk after AS came out and everyone was reading back through Vinyals’s stuff and noticed he’d said something at Blizzcon (and then after a bunch of searching, I finally found that transcript, since the video is still paywalled by Blizzard). Oh well!