[Kerbonut]

What if it sleeps for 8 hours every 16 hours and during that sleep period, it updates its weights with whatever knowledge it learned that day? Then it doesn't need $1B of compute every 3 months, it would use the $1B of compute for 8 hours every day. Now extrapolate the compute required for this into the future and the costs will come down. I don't know where I was going with that...

[HarHarVeryFunny]

These current LLMs are purely pre-trained - there is no way to do incremental learning (other than a small amount of fine-tuning) without disrupting what they were pre-trained on. In any case, even if someone solves incremental learning, this is just a way of growing the dataset, which is happening anyway, and under the much more controlled/curated way needed to see much benefit.

There is very much a recipe (10% if this, 20% of that, curriculum learning, mix of modalities, etc) for the type of curated dataset creation and training schedule needed to advance model capabilities. There have even been some recent signs of "inverse scaling" where a smaller model performs better in some areas than a larger one due to getting this mix wrong. Throwing more random data at them isn't what is needed.

I assume we will eventually move beyond pre-trained transformers to better architectures where maybe architectural advances and learning algorithms do have more potential for AI-designed improvement, but it seems the best role for AI currently is synthetic data generation, and developer tools.