Azeem Azhar in Exponential View:
Schmidt confessed to revising his AI outlook every six months, a testament to the field’s volatility. He shared a striking example: “Six months ago, I was convinced that the gap [between frontier AI models and the rest] was getting smaller, so I invested lots of money in the little companies. Now I’m not so sure.”
Now, please don’t focus on the fact that Schmidt thinks the future is in ever-larger models (he does). Rather, consider the nature of his knowledge. He is an insider’s insider, about as well-informed as anyone in this field can be, and unlike some critics, he is also putting his money where his mouth is, backing many AI companies like Mistal, Kyutai and Asari.
Schmidt understands scale and gets neural nets. After all, he ran Google when it acquired Deepmind, developed the transformer architecture and built tensor processing units, the first chips dedicated to speeding up deep learning. And Google has been about scale since its inception.
Despite this, just six months ago, this tech titan thought smaller models might stand a chance to push the frontier. He doesn’t believe that anymore.
The point is that he was either right then or he is right now. It took just six months for a u-turn. That is the degree of uncertainty.
More here.
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