When OpenAI announced the release of their  GPT-3 API last year, the tech world was shocked. Here was a language model, trained only to perform a simple autocomplete task, which turned out to be capable of language translation, coding, essay writing, question answering and many other tasks that previously would each have required purpose-built systems.

What accounted for GPT-3’s ability to solve these problems? How did it beat state-of-the-art AIs that were purpose-built to solve tasks it was never explicitly trained for? Was it a brilliant new algorithm? Something deeper than deep learning?

Well… no. As algorithms go, GPT-3 was relatively simple, and was built using a by-then fairly standard transformer architecture. Instead of a fancy algorithm, the real difference between GPT-3 and everything that came before was size: GPT-3 is a simple-but-massive, 175B-parameter model, about 10X bigger than the next largest AI system.

GPT-3 is only the latest in a long line of results that now show that scaling up simple AI techniques can give rise to new behavior, and far greater capabilities. Together, these results have motivated a push toward AI scaling: the pursuit of ever larger AIs, trained with more compute on bigger datasets. But scaling is expensive: by some estimates, GPT-3 cost as much as $5M to train. As a result, only well-resources companies like Google, OpenAI and Microsoft have been able to experiment with scaled models.

That’s a problem for independent AI safety researchers, who want to better understand how advanced AI systems work, and what their most dangerous behaviors might be, but who can’t afford a $5M compute budget. That’s why a recent paper by Andy Jones, an independent researcher specialized in AI scaling, is so promising: Andy’s paper shows that, at least in some contexts, the capabilities of large AI systems can be predicted from those of smaller ones. If the result generalizes, it could give independent researchers the ability to run cheap experiments on small systems, which nonetheless generalize to expensive, scaled AIs like GPT-3. Andy was kind enough to join me for this episode of the podcast.