Dario's 2017 'Big Blob of Compute' essay hailed as sharper than the Bitter Lesson
paraschopra · x · 2026-10-12
paraschopra shares the PDF link to Dario Amodei's 2017 essay "The Big Blob of Compute" for direct reading. The essay, seen as an earlier and richer elaboration of the Bitter Lesson, argues that efficient algorithms are "coding" rather than AI, compute-with-knobs acts as a sponge, any general architecture suffices with magic in data and objectives, and training on distributions beats single-task instances.
More from AGI Musings
- 'The most important chart for the AI economy': models commoditize, compute wins — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-12
- AI Has Come For Call Centers: Job Losses Now Spread to Lower-Middle-Income Countries — FinanceYF5 · 2026-10-12
- Re-evaluating Steve Jobs: iPhone's net impact on society — granawkins · 2026-10-12
- From nuclear safety to AI: containing agents with signals they can't produce — WeldPond · 2026-10-12
- Personal Agents Nail First Impressions but Lack Daily Use Cases for Retention — sujingshen · 2026-10-12
- willcb: every non-RL algorithm is a proxy — policy gradients are the minimum-variance unbiased estimator — willcb · 2026-10-12