I’d be interested to dig into this claim more. What exactly is the claim, and what is the justification for it? If the claim is something like “For most tasks, the thinking machines seem to need 0 to 3 orders of magnitude more experience on the task before they equal human performance” then I tentatively agree. But if it’s instead 6 to 9 OOMs, or even just a solid 3 OOMs, I’d say “citation needed!”
No precise claim, I’m afraid! The whole post was written from a place of “OK but what are my independent impressions on this stuff?”, and then setting down the things that felt most true in impression space. I guess I meant something like “IDK, seems like they maybe need 0 to 6 OOMs more”, but I just don’t think my impressions should be taken as strong evidence on this point.
The general point about the economic viability of automating specialized labour is about more than just data efficiency; there are other ~fixed costs for automating industries which mean small specialized industries will be later to be automated.
(It’s maybe worth commenting that the scenarios I describe here are mostly not like “current architecture just scales all the way to human-level and beyond with more compute”. If they actually do scale then maybe superhuman generalization happens significantly earlier in the process.)
No precise claim, I’m afraid! The whole post was written from a place of “OK but what are my independent impressions on this stuff?”, and then setting down the things that felt most true in impression space. I guess I meant something like “IDK, seems like they maybe need 0 to 6 OOMs more”, but I just don’t think my impressions should be taken as strong evidence on this point.
The general point about the economic viability of automating specialized labour is about more than just data efficiency; there are other ~fixed costs for automating industries which mean small specialized industries will be later to be automated.
(It’s maybe worth commenting that the scenarios I describe here are mostly not like “current architecture just scales all the way to human-level and beyond with more compute”. If they actually do scale then maybe superhuman generalization happens significantly earlier in the process.)