I believe that in the future, the main paradigm for intellectual
achievement will be through individuals using scaled compute, rather
than individuals relying solely on their own intelligence, at least
for many tasks. This new paradigm scales well: through model
enhancement, increased compute power, and decreasing model costs,
these factors together will allow this new paradigm to become the
dominant force.
As a result, quickly adapting to this new paradigm today is very
valuable, enabling individuals to achieve more as their capabilities
scale with compute. If a person only relies on their own intelligence,
they cannot fully leverage this paradigm. Therefore, one important
criterion for evaluating engineers today should be whether their
capabilities and achievements scale with this new paradigm. And I
believe that, all things being equal, certain abilities—especially
imagination—can be scaled much better through this paradigm.
For example, I have some imaginative and interesting ideas, and I can
feel that as this paradigm improves, these ideas become much easier to
realize. However, some other abilities, such as detailed operational
skills for specific tasks, do not seem to scale as well with this
paradigm.
We can already see that different engineers use models in very different ways
during the process of model scaling, and the amount of help they get varies
greatly. However, imagination, critical thinking, and communication skills—all of
these abilities seem to be able to scale alongside the paradigm very well. So,
having these skills may become more important, because they can keep up with
the scaling of the paradigm. Other abilities, which cannot scale with the
paradigm, may gradually become less important—especially the mechanical
memorization of how to perform intellectual tasks.
Another interesting aspect is that certain capabilities actually become more
valuable when they are abundant—for example, imagination. Whereas other
capabilities become less valuable when they are more common—for example,
logical thinking. The reason for this, I think, is because creative works can
actually stimulate and inspire others to be even more creative. Whereas logical
reasoning generally only requires one person getting it right one time. So to me,
creativity seems to be more like a non-zero-sum game than logical reasoning.
We see this in cultural movements as well; cultural movements generally happen
in an explosion, where a lot of artists are mutually inspired by each other.