A Scaling-Hypothesis Thread Framing Pretraining as the Path to Intelligence
lambdaviking · x · 2026-08-04
The thread points to Gwern’s scaling hypothesis as a canonical “pretraining thesis”: the idea that the path to intelligence is to keep optimizing the final bits of cross-entropy, rather than treating a pretrained base model as just one component inside a larger system.
The exchange is essentially about the worldview behind “scaling-pilled” thinking — whether intelligence emerges primarily from ever-better pretraining, or from building more elaborate systems around a base model.
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