Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang discusses limits on generalization in current multimodal foundation models.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wang: The path to AGI resembles curing cancer, not a vaccine
“My biggest belief here is that the path to AGI is is one that looks a lot more like curing cancer than developing a vaccine. And what I mean by that is I think that the path to build AGI is going to be in, in, you know, you're going to have to solve a bunch of…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wang: No strong evidence that video creates useful AI world models
“I don't think there's strong scientific evidence of that yet. Maybe there will be eventually.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Alexandr Wang: Achieving AGI will take multiple decades of solving individual problems.
“My biggest belief here is that the path to AGI is is one that looks a lot more like curing cancer than developing a vaccine. And what I mean by that is I think that the path to build AGI is going to be in, in, you know, you're going to have to solve a bunch of…”
Assertion Partly supported
Alexandr Wang: Cross-modality training produces no positive transfer between video and text.
“I think the main thing, fundamentally, is I think there's very limited generality that we get from these models and even for multimodality, for example my understanding there's no positive transfer from learning in one modality to other modalities. So like tra…”
Assertion Supported
Wang: Standard academic benchmarks are contaminated by training data overfitting
“Most of the benchmarks that we as a community look at... Academic benchmarks that are what the industry used to measure the performance of these algorithms are fraught with issues. Many of the models are overfit on these benchmarks. They're sort of in the trai…”
Insight
Alexandr Wang: Data abundance is the fundamental bottleneck for post-GPT-4 models.
“The key to the scaling of these large language models and the, you know, these language models in general is the ability to scale data. And I think that one of the fundamental bottlenecks to, you know, what's, what's in the way of us getting from GPT-IV to GPT…”