Unpublished 2017 Dario Amodei Memo 'Big Blob of Compute' Revealed as Origin of the AI Race
kevinroose · x · 2026-10-06
NYT journalist Kevin Roose has published an excerpt of "Big Blob of Compute" (BBOC), a previously unpublished 2017 internal research document by Dario Amodei written when he was a researcher at OpenAI, ahead of the release of Roose's book The AGI Chronicles.
Key points:
- BBOC laid out Amodei's hypothesis that scaling up AI models was by far the best way to make them smarter.
- GPT-2 was the experiment testing that hypothesis; when it worked, OpenAI went all-in on scaling, triggering the race the industry is still in today.
- The memo has taken on mythical proportions inside the industry, which is now spending trillions of dollars building the "big blobs" Amodei believed necessary to reach AGI.
Roose calls it the essay that started the AI race, a historical artifact now seeing the light of day for the first time.
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