BREAKING: Expensive new evidence that scaling is not all you need

Two more colossally expensive experiments have failed

Remember the good old days a few years ago when almost everybody thought that the royal road to AGI ws just spending more money on compute and data?

That hypothesis continues to go badly, as expensive experiments from two of the world’s wealthiest men have just shown.

On the hand, it’s become clear that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest model at Meta is good but not great, and not what he was hoping for.

And in the very same week, Elon Musk has conceded that for all the gigantic models xAI has built, xAI was ”not built right first time around”. Instead most of the founders are gone, and Musk has said that the company “is being rebuilt from the foundations up”.¹

So much for pure scaling²

Two of the most expensive scientific experiments in history. Sooo much money down the drain.

All based on the strange and dubious-from-the-start religion of scaling-über-alles.

In my 2020 article, The Next Decade in AI, I foresaw all this, and urged the field to start focusing on world (cognitive) models and neurosymbolic AI. Now, maybe, we can finally move on to those projects?

So much time, money, and energy was lost chasing hype.

1. Elon’s concession also fits well with the theory offered here on Feb 3 that SpaceX’s acquisition of xAI at $250 billion was a thinly disguised bailout. You don’t pay $250 billion for a company that was built wrong from the foundations.

2. Musk could —literally— have saved tens of billions of dollars, if he had asked me….