Why Did GPT-2 Scare Dario Amodei?

Dario Amodei says GPT-2 scared him because it was the first real test of the scaling-laws hypothesis, and it made him think a much larger model would surpass humans at everything. He was not very involved in GPT-1. He pushed a larger, more expensive experiment on the bet that language models get more coherent as they grow.

He treats the jump from GPT-1 to GPT-2 as a definitive experiment with a strange prediction. Scale the model by another factor of a million, he thought, and it would be better than humans at everything, and it would determine the fate of nations, economies, and the future of humanity. About 10% of the people around him, often the ones he considered smartest, had the same reaction. About 90% shrugged, because GPT-2 was not impressive in any single area. It could translate, summarize a document, and write a few lines of code, and people still treated the limits as decisive. Hard tasks become easy within six months, and tasks that seemed impossible show up regularly within twelve months. The same pattern has kept spreading.