Jeremy Howard, co-founder of Answer.ai, critiques OpenAI's compute spending strategy and economics during a discussion with Matt Turck on The MAD Podcast.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Howard: Closed US AI ecosystems will cause China to move faster
“Whereas, oddly, the US companies that used to lead the way have all drawn up the drawbridges, and that's gonna cause China to keep moving faster, because when you're in that more, both collaborative and competitive environment, you just Go way ahead, as we've …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Howard: Test-time compute scaling will hit diminishing returns within two years
“It's a thing where you get most of the juice out of it in the first year or two, so we're still in that. Phase at the moment, and we'll start to hit the curve off point pretty soon. Just like we did for training.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Howard: No more evidence for near-term ASI today than 15 years ago
“I don't think we have any more evidence that ASI might be close now than we did 15 years ago, 15 years before that.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Howard: AI growth will continue tailing off as low-hanging fruit disappears
“The amount of people and money being put into AI, it's going to keep going up, but again, the low hanging fruits being done now. So yeah, I think we'll continue to see the tailing off of growth.”
Opinion
Howard: Traditional AI labs favor paper citations over bold innovation
“It's very different to a research lab, which is like, hey, let's try and get lots of citations on a paper in a field that's so highly recognizable to its peers that they recognize it as being something they want to appear at their next conference, you know, wh…”
Opinion
Howard: Autonomous AI coding agent Devin produces low-quality, useless software
“Devon's an agent you know, a bunch of tools, tool calls, and tied together with an OpenAI model, if I understand correctly. Yeah, and it actually ended up definitely supporting our thesis, which is, there are so many places we wished we could have got involved…”