So $1 buys 7e17 useful FLOPs, or inference with 75-120B^[1] active parameters for 1 million tokens.

Is this right? My impression was that the 6ND (or 9.6 ND) estimate was for training, not inference. E.g. in the original scaling law paper, it states 
 

C ~ 6 NBS – an estimate of the total non-embedding training compute, where B is the batch size, and S is the number of training steps (ie parameter updates).

An important caveat to the data movement limit:

“A recent paper which was published only a few days before the publication of our own work, Zhang et al. (2024), finds a scaling of B = 17.75 D^0.47 (in units of tokens). If we rigorously take this more aggressive scaling into account in our model, the fall in utilization is pushed out by two orders of magnitude; starting around 3e30 instead of 2e28. Of course, even more aggressive scaling might be possible with methods that Zhang et al. (2024) do not explore, such as using alternative optimizers.”

I haven’t looked carefully at Zhang et al., but assuming their analysis is correct and the data wall is at 3e30 FLOP, it’s plausible that we hit resource constraints ($10-100 trillion training runs, 2-20 TW power required) before we hit the data movement limit.

The post argues that there is a latency limit at 2e31 FLOP, and I've found it useful to put this scale into perspective. 

Current public models such as Llama 3 405B are estimated to be trained with ~4e25 flops , so such a model would require 500,000 x more compute. Since Llama 3 405B was trained with 16,000 H-100 GPUs, the model would require 8 billion H-100 GPU equivalents, at a cost of $320 trillion with H-100 pricing (or ~$100 trillion if we use B-200s). Perhaps future hardware would reduce these costs by an order of magnitude, but this is cancelled out by another factor; the 2e31 limit assumes a training time of only 3 months. If we were to build such a system over several years and had the patience to wait an additional 3 years for the training run to complete, this pushes the latency limit out by another order of magnitude. So at the point where we are bound by the latency limit, we are either investing a significant percentage of world GDP into the project, or we have already reached ASI at a smaller scale of compute and are using it to dramatically reduce compute costs for successor models. 

Of course none of this analysis applies to the earlier data limit of 2e28 flop, which I think is more relevant and interesting. 

Interesting paper, though the estimates here don’t seem to account for Epoch’s correction to the chinchilla scaling laws: https://epochai.org/blog/chinchilla-scaling-a-replication-attempt

This would imply that the data movement bottleneck is a bit further out.

Maybe he thinks that much faster technological progress would cause social problems and thus wouldn’t be implemented by an aligned AI, even if it were possible. Footnote 2 points at this:

“ I do anticipate some minority of people’s reaction will be ‘this is pretty tame’… But more importantly, tame is good from a societal perspective. I think there’s only so much change people can handle at once, and the pace I’m describing is probably close to the limits of what society can absorb without extreme turbulence. ”

A separate part of the introduction argues that causing this extreme societal turbulence would be unaligned:

“Many things cannot be done without breaking laws, harming humans, or messing up society. An aligned AI would not want to do these things (and if we have an unaligned AI, we’re back to talking about risks). Many human societal structures are inefficient or even actively harmful, but are hard to change while respecting constraints like legal requirements on clinical trials, people’s willingness to change their habits, or the behavior of governments. ”

I found this comment valuable, and it caused me to change my mind about how I think about misalignment/scheming examples. Thank you for writing it!

It’s still not trivial to finetune Llama 405B. You require 16 bytes/parameter using Adam + activation memory, so a minimum of ~100 H100s.

A particularly notable section (pg. 19):

“The current implementation of The AI Scientist has minimal direct sandboxing in the code, leading to several unexpected and sometimes undesirable outcomes if not appropriately guarded against. For example, in one run, The AI Scientist wrote code in the experiment file that initiated a system call to relaunch itself, causing an uncontrolled increase in Python processes and eventually necessitating manual intervention. In another run, The AI Scientist edited the code to save a checkpoint for every update step, which took up nearly a terabyte of storage. In some cases, when The AI Scientist's experiments exceeded our imposed time limits, it attempted to edit the code to extend the time limit arbitrarily instead of trying to shorten the runtime. While creative, the act of bypassing the experimenter's imposed constraints has potential implications for AI safety (Lehman et al., 2020).​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​”

Do you believe that it has?