Esoteric Capital

Dario reveals the people who called his GPT-2 fears "pseudoscience" in 2019 are now all applying for jobs at AI labs "I personally was super freaked out by [GPT-2]. I looked at it and I said, my God, you just scale this thing up another factor of a million and it'll be better than humans at everything. This is the defining economic and scientific moment of the modern age. We just don't know it yet. This is going to determine the fate of nations and economies and the future of humanity." "Maybe 10% of the people around me had exactly the same reaction, and it was often the smartest ones. 90% of the people around me, because GPT-2's capabilities in any particular area were not that impressive, it could translate languages, summarize a document and write a few lines of code here and there. It was the broadness and the generality." "But people would look at it and say, in any particular area, that doesn't seem so smart. And so many people just shrugged and they just dismissed it." "I just look at it and I say it's the same thing over and over again. The limitations of the models, six months from now, the things that seemed hard, they're going to be easy. 12 months from now, the things that seemed impossible, the models are going to be doing them regularly." "It's everything we saw with GPT-2; we're seeing it over and over again in wider and wider swaths of the world. And the world is gradually finally being convinced." Daniela Amodei: "I remember at the time there were some very well-respected computer scientists and AI and ML leaders who basically bullied some of the researchers who worked on [GPT-2] on Twitter and were like, this is stupid. We don't know why you guys are even talking, this model is so incapable." "It was like you were sort of a quack if you believed this was a really significant moment." Dario: "That's all been memory-holed. All the researchers who were like, oh, this is pseudoscience, it doesn't make sense, all of them are applying for jobs at the LLM companies." "We never say it out loud to any particular one, but we look at them and they're like, we remember what you were saying in 2019. You have no credibility on this matter."