Part 1/3:
The Limits of Compute and the Rapid Advancement of Powerful AI
The rapid development of large language models and the increasing scale of compute power used to train them have raised questions about the limits of this trajectory. According to the speaker, the current frontier models being developed by major tech companies are operating at a scale of around $1 billion, with plans to scale up to a few billion dollars next year, and potentially reaching over 10 billion dollars by 2026 or 2027. There are even ambitions to build 100 billion dollar compute clusters within the next decade.
However, the speaker notes that even a 100 billion dollar compute cluster may not be enough to fully satisfy the demand for more powerful AI systems. This raises the possibility that either even greater compute scale will be required, or that more efficient methods of training and deploying these models will need to be developed.
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