Economics studies the scaling laws of systems of human industry. LLMs and multicellular organisms and tokamaks have their own scaling laws, the constraints ensuring optimality of their scaling don’t transfer between these very different machines. A better design doesn’t just choose more optimal hyperparameters or introduce scaling multipliers, it can occasionally create a new thing acting on different inputs and outputs, scaling in its own way, barely noticing what holds back the other things.
Economics studies the scaling laws of systems of human industry. LLMs and multicellular organisms and tokamaks have their own scaling laws, the constraints ensuring optimality of their scaling don’t transfer between these very different machines. A better design doesn’t just choose more optimal hyperparameters or introduce scaling multipliers, it can occasionally create a new thing acting on different inputs and outputs, scaling in its own way, barely noticing what holds back the other things.