You can build a good engine without any sensors inside, and indeed people did—i.e. back in the 19th century when sensors of that sort didn’t exist yet. (They had thermometers and pressure gauges, but they couldn’t just get any information from any point inside the engine block, like we can by looking at activations in a NN.) What the engineers of the 19th century had, and what we need, is a general theory. For engines, that was thermodynamics. For AI, we need some kind of Theory of Intelligence. The scaling laws might be pointing the way to a kind of thermodynamics of intelligence.
You can build a good engine without any sensors inside, and indeed people did—i.e. back in the 19th century when sensors of that sort didn’t exist yet. (They had thermometers and pressure gauges, but they couldn’t just get any information from any point inside the engine block, like we can by looking at activations in a NN.) What the engineers of the 19th century had, and what we need, is a general theory. For engines, that was thermodynamics. For AI, we need some kind of Theory of Intelligence. The scaling laws might be pointing the way to a kind of thermodynamics of intelligence.