Just listened to a podcast with a couple of guys talking about the AI thing going on. One thing they said was really interesting to me. I’ll paraphrase my understanding of what they said:

• In 2020, people realized that the same model, same architecture, but with more parameters ie a larger version of the model, behaved more intelligently and had a larger set of skills than the same model with fewer parameters.
• This means you can trade money for IQ. You spend more money, get more computing power, and your model will be better than the other guy’s
• Your model being better means you can do more things, replace more tasks, and hence make more money
• Essentially this makes the current AI market a very straightforward money-in-determines-money-out situation
• In other words, the realization that the same AI model, only bigger, was significantly better, created a pathway for reliably investing huge amounts of money into building bigger and bigger models

So basically AI was meandering around trying to find the right road, and in 2020 it found a road that goes a long way in a straight line, enabling the industry to just floor the accelerator.

The direct relationship this model creates between more neurons/weights/parameters on the one hand, and more intelligence on the other, creates an almost arbitrage-easy way to absorb tons of money into profitable structures.