When capability increases so substantially, the activity under discussion is not “the same thing, only faster”. It is a different activity altogether. We can look to the physics of phase change for clues here.

Basically, I want to immunize you against this analogy, and this objection. There’s plenty to debate in this nascent field, but any comparison between AI training and human education is just laughably wrong.

This is what digitization does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it undermines our intuitions about production and exchange.

No human ever metabolized information as completely as these language models. “As our case is new, so we must think anew, and act anew.” You’re gonna need fresh intuitions.

— Robin Sloan, At home in high-dimensional space, 2024