Models will stall near human-level since pretraining data holds nothing smarter, researcher argues
burny_tech · x · 2026-09-21
AI commentator Drachs1978 offers a blunt take: models will converge on human intelligence because there is nothing in the pretraining data smarter than humans — and once we get near human-level, progress will become hard.
The claim cuts at a core controversy of the current scaling paradigm: whether the ceiling of pretraining data caps model capability. It stands in contrast to the mainstream optimism around synthetic data and RL breaking through data bottlenecks, making it a useful contrarian datapoint.
Related event: Debate Erupts Over Whether LLMs Can Surpass Human-Level Intelligence(3 posts)→
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