Part 1/3:

AI Advancement: Slowing Down or Accelerating?

The Debate Over AI Progress

• Major AI companies like Google and OpenAI have suggested that AI advancement is slowing down, with OpenAI co-founder Ilya Sutskever saying the 2010s were the "age of scaling" and now the industry is in the "age of wonder and discovery" again.

• However, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei sees a path to AGI (artificial general intelligence) by 2026 or 2027, a much shorter timeline than the slowdown narrative.

Reasons for Differing Interpretations

• The slowdown may be related to diminishing returns from scaling up training data and models. The quality of data and how it's used for inference may matter more now.

• But the ability to scale up inference compute, as seen with OpenAI's GPT-3 and upcoming models, could allow for continued rapid progress.

• Amodei believes that even with potential hurdles like data shortages or geopolitical events, AGI could still arrive in the next 2-3 years.

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