AI Scaling Is More Like Nuclear Fusion Than Alchemy
willccbb · x · 2026-07-16
The core idea is that many new model tricks are essentially just "compute multipliers." While valuable, the room for further exploration is shrinking. The author notes that one of the most important data multipliers discovered recently is a 90s RL algorithm, and scaling data is much messier and harder than scaling compute.
In a replied comment, the analogy for ASI was corrected to being "more like nuclear fusion than alchemy": it could fundamentally change the world, but the process will be long, and the laws of physics still apply.
Related event: Researchers cool expectations around 1000x AI R&D speedups(8 posts)→
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