Sam Altman says ‘there is no wall’ in an apparent response to fears of an AI slowdown

Sam Altman has previously said that AI scaling laws are “decided by god.”

Sam Altman has said, “There is no wall,” in an apparent reference to concerns that OpenAI and other companies are facing a slowdown in advancing their AI models.

His comment — posted to X Thursday — follows a report in The Information that OpenAI’s next model has shown only a moderate improvement over ChatGPT-4 and a smaller leap compared to previous versions.

It has sparked concerns in the tech world that the techniques that have historically made AI models smarter — more training data and greater computing power — are resulting in diminishing returns.

there is no wall

— Sam Altman (@sama) November 14, 2024

Altman, who has a history of short, cryptic messages on X, has previously indicated that these so-called scaling laws are preordained. He posted to the site in February that they are “decided by god” and that the “constants are determined by members of the technical staff.”

Ilya Sutskever, a cofounder of OpenAI and Safe Superintelligence, told Reuters on Monday that results from scaling up pretraining had plateaued. However, others, such as Microsoft’s chief technology officer, Kevin Scott, have previously dismissed these concerns. He told Sequoia Capital’s “Training Data” podcast in July that “we’re not at diminishing marginal returns on scale-up.”

AI labs are also exploring ways to overcome any slowdowns, such as using synthetic data and refining models after they have been trained, using a technique called inference.

The huge sums of money invested in frontier AI companies have created pressure to produce increasingly more powerful models.

Last month, OpenAI raised $6.6 billion from investors in a record funding round.

OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment from B-17.