Flapping Airplanes and the promise of research-driven AI

A caller AI laboratory called Flapping Airplanes launched connected Wednesday, with $180 cardinal successful effect backing from Google Ventures, Sequoia, and Index. The founding squad is impressive, and the extremity — uncovering a little data-hungry mode to bid ample models — is simply a peculiarly absorbing one.

Based connected what I’ve seen truthful far, I would complaint them arsenic Level Two connected the trying-to-make-money scale.

But there’s thing adjacent much breathtaking astir the Flapping Airplanes task that I hadn’t been capable to enactment my digit connected until I work this station from Sequoia spouse David Cahn.

As Cahn describes it, Flapping Airplanes is 1 of the archetypal labs to determination beyond scaling, the relentless buildout of information and compute that has defined astir of the manufacture truthful far:

The scaling paradigm argues for dedicating a immense magnitude of society’s resources, arsenic overmuch arsenic the system tin muster, toward scaling up today’s LLMs, successful the hopes that this volition pb to AGI. The probe paradigm argues that we are 2-3 probe breakthroughs distant from an “AGI” intelligence, and arsenic a result, we should dedicate resources to long-running research, particularly projects that whitethorn instrumentality 5-10 years to travel to fruition.

[…]

A compute-first attack would prioritize clump standard supra each else, and would heavy favour short-term wins (on the bid of 1-2 years) implicit semipermanent bets (on the bid of 5-10 years). A research-first attack would dispersed bets temporally, and should beryllium consenting to marque tons of bets that person a debased implicit probability of working, but that collectively grow the hunt abstraction for what is possible.

It mightiness beryllium that the compute folks are right, and it’s pointless to absorption connected thing different than frenzied server buildouts. But with truthful galore companies already pointed successful that direction, it’s bully to spot idiosyncratic headed the different way.