Forethought's Tom Davidson: data bottlenecks will slow, not stop, an intelligence explosion
connoraxiotes · x · 2026-09-10
Tom Davidson of Forethought published a new essay arguing that data bottlenecks won't prevent an intelligence explosion — only slow it. He examines the strongest bottleneck arguments and rebuts them: instead of needing millions of trajectories per job with today's data-hungry algorithms, the path is a software intelligence explosion inside a datacenter where superintelligent-at-AI-research systems design far more sample-efficient learning algorithms, needing data comparable to (or less than) what a human learns from. On sim-to-real concerns, he argues trained neural nets generalize poorly, but learning algorithms generalize well — the same algorithm mastering chess can master Go (AlphaZero).
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