Chollet says intelligence is “making the ball rounder,” not building the tower taller
binarybits · x · 2026-07-27
Noah quotes François Chollet saying intelligence is less like “building the tower taller” and more like making the ball rounder. The implication is that once a system is already very capable, improvements become increasingly marginal.
He uses that framing to argue that even if AI keeps getting better at narrow tasks, broad gains may be limited by the finite amount of useful signal that can be extracted from data and from the world itself.
Related event: Chollet: Advancing AI is Like Smoothing a Sphere, Not Building a Tower(2 posts)→
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