That’s why I used the “no new commercial breakthroughs” clause, $300bn training systems by 2029 seem in principle possible both technically and financially without an intelligence explosion, just not with the capabilities legibly demonstrated so far. On the other hand, pre-training as we know it will end[1] in any case soon thereafter, because at ~current pace a 2034 training system would need to cost $15 trillion (it’s unclear if manufacturing can be scaled at this pace, and also what to do with that much compute, because there isn’t nearly enough text data, but maybe pre-training on all the video will be important for robotics).
This is of course a quote from Sutskever’s talk. It was widely interpreted as saying it has just ended, in 2024-2025, but he never put a date on it. I don’t think it will end before 2027-2028.
That’s why I used the “no new commercial breakthroughs” clause, $300bn training systems by 2029 seem in principle possible both technically and financially without an intelligence explosion, just not with the capabilities legibly demonstrated so far. On the other hand, pre-training as we know it will end[1] in any case soon thereafter, because at ~current pace a 2034 training system would need to cost $15 trillion (it’s unclear if manufacturing can be scaled at this pace, and also what to do with that much compute, because there isn’t nearly enough text data, but maybe pre-training on all the video will be important for robotics).
How far RL scales remains unclear, and even at the very first step of scaling o3 doesn’t work as clear evidence because it’s still unknown if it’s based on GPT-4o or GPT-4.5 (it’ll become clearer once there’s an API price and more apples-to-apples speed measurements).
This is of course a quote from Sutskever’s talk. It was widely interpreted as saying it has just ended, in 2024-2025, but he never put a date on it. I don’t think it will end before 2027-2028.