This is the full text of a post from "The Obsolete Newsletter," a Substack that I write about the intersection of capitalism, geopolitics, and artificial intelligence. I’m a freelance journalist and the author of a forthcoming book called Obsolete: Power, Profit, and the Race for Machine Superintelligence. Consider subscribing to stay up to date with my work.

[EDIT: I should have credited Gary Marcus for coining the term “deep learning is hitting a wall" back in March 2022. I didn’t actually realize it had originated entirely with him, given how much it's entered the lexicon. He argued that LLMs were hitting diminishing returns in April 2024, which was an input into my similar prediction in June. He also had a post up on Saturday analyzing some of the same evidence included here.]

Ilya Sutskever is perhaps the most influential proponent of the scaling hypothesis — the idea that simply [...]

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Outline:

(04:59) Economics of AI

(08:32) Maybe AGI will just be really expensive

(10:55) Implications

(13:41) Cutting through the hype

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