Remember the good old days a few years ago when almost everybody thought that the royal road to AGI ws just spending more money on compute and data?

That hypothesis continues to go badly, as expensive experiments from two of the world’s wealthiest men have just shown.

On the hand, it’s become clear that Mark Zuckerberg’s latest model at Meta is good but not great, and not what he was hoping for.

And in the very same week, Elon Musk has conceded that for all the gigantic models xAI has built, xAI was ”not built right first time around”. Instead most of the founders are gone, and Musk has said that the company “is being rebuilt from the foundations up”.1

So much for pure scaling2

Two of the most expensive scientific experiments in history. Sooo much money down the drain.

All based on the strange and dubious-from-the-start religion of scaling-über-alles.