2.5 months is enough to provide a very strong AI research acceleration, so the trend is likely to be changing towards larger share of algorithmic efficiency in the future (e.g. if we freeze the compute, the progress will not stop even now, although it would slow down noticeably).
We should also keep in mind that once you get past ~8 hrs we can’t say the time is comparable to calendar time. A task that takes a human 24 hours doesn’t take a day. It takes 3 full working days. Which, when you account for non-focused-work-time overhead, means something like 80% of a work week. This would mean that when we say something like “2.5 months,” that’s actually a project that would take a human around a year of their life to complete, mixed in with all the other things a human does.
Thanks, a very useful analysis.
2.5 months is enough to provide a very strong AI research acceleration, so the trend is likely to be changing towards larger share of algorithmic efficiency in the future (e.g. if we freeze the compute, the progress will not stop even now, although it would slow down noticeably).
We should also keep in mind that once you get past ~8 hrs we can’t say the time is comparable to calendar time. A task that takes a human 24 hours doesn’t take a day. It takes 3 full working days. Which, when you account for non-focused-work-time overhead, means something like 80% of a work week. This would mean that when we say something like “2.5 months,” that’s actually a project that would take a human around a year of their life to complete, mixed in with all the other things a human does.