Comment by carlita_express
4 days ago
> we’ve observed that large-scale reinforcement learning exhibits the same “more compute = better performance” trend observed in GPT‑series pretraining.
Didn’t the pivot to RL from pretraining happen because the scaling “law” didn’t deliver the expected gains? (Or at least because O(log) increases in model performance became unreasonably costly?) I see they’ve finally resigned themselves to calling these trends, not laws, but trends are often fleeting. Why should we expect this one to hold for much longer?
This isn't exactly the case. The trend is a log scale. So a 10x in pretraining should yield a 10% increase in performance. That's not proving to be false per say but rather they are encountering practical limitations around 10x'ing data volume and 10x'ing available compute.
I am aware of that, like I said:
> (Or at least because O(log) increases in model performance became unreasonably costly?)
But, yes, I left implicit in my comment that the trend might be “fleeting” because of its impracticality. RL is only a trend so long as it is fashionable, and only fashionable (i.e., practical) so long as OpenAI is fed an exponential amount of VC money to ensure linear improvements under O(log) conditions.
OpenAI is selling to VCs the idea that some hitherto unspecified amount of linear model improvement will kick off productivity gains greater than their exponentially increasing investment. These productivity gains would be no less than a sizeable percentage of American GDP, which Altman has publicly set as his target. But as the capital required increases exponentially, the gap between linearly increasing model capability (i.e., its productivity) and the breakeven ROI target widens. The bigger model would need to deliver a non-linear increase in productivity to justify the exponential price tag.
This happens once it starts improving itself.
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It doesn't need to hold forever or even 'much longer' depending on your definition of that duration. It just needs to hold on long enough to realize certain capabilities.
Will it ? Who knows. But seeing as this is something you can't predict ahead of time, it makes little sense not to try in so far as the whole thing is still feasible.