OpenAI delivering an iterative update rather than a revolutionary one has lengthened many people’s timelines. My take is that this incentivizes many more players into trying for the frontier. Xai’s Grok has gone from non-existent in 2022 to a leading model. The rollout pace of improvements to the newest version of Grok are far more frequent than other leading companies. Nvidia has also recently begun releasing open larger source models as well as the accompanyin datasets. Meta is another player that is now all-in. The failure of Llama and moderate updates by OpenAI likely pushed Zuckerberg into realizing that his favored relentless A/B testing at scale could work. Twenty-nine billion for new datacenters and huge payout for top minds is like a beacon for sovereign wealth / hedge funds to notice that the science fiction reality is now here. When the prize is up for grabs much more captial will be thrown into the arena than if the winner was a foregone conclusion.
So, my timelines have shortened due to market sentiment conditions and dawning realizations rather than benchmarks improving. While tech stocks may fall, bubbles may burst, and benchmarks could stagnate; I still believe the very idea of taking the lead in AGI trumps all.
Hopefully, you might convince a number of frontier model companies to donate a percentage of their compute for your efforts. Even Elon has been fairly decent when it comes to loaning out portions of Colossus’ time (at a hefty price). It certainly seems worth trying to at least ask the major players.