Co-founder of Arb, an AI / forecasting / etc consultancy. Doing a technical AI PhD.
Conflicts of interest: ESPR, EPSRC, Emergent Ventures, OpenPhil, Infrastructure Fund, Alvea.
Nitpick: It's fairly unlikely that GPT-4 is 1tn params; this size doesn't seem compute-optimal. I grant you the Semafor assertion is some evidence, but I'm putting more weight on compute arithmetic.
Oh that is annoying, thanks for pointing it out. I've just tried to use the new column width feature to fix it, but no luck.
it is good to omit doing what might perhaps bring some profit to the living, when we have in view the accomplishment of other ends that will be of much greater advantage to posterity.
- Descartes (1637)
See also Anthropic's view on this
The implicit strat (which Olah may not endorse) is to try to solve easy bits, then move on to harder bits, then note the rate you are progressing at and get a sense of how hard things are that way.
This would be fine if we could be sure we actually were solving the problems, and also not fooling ourselves about the current difficulty level, and if the relevant research landscape is smooth and not blockable by a single missing piece.