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Culture War Roundup for the week of January 12, 2026

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My guesses for how quickly this stuff will progress haven't done great

Reading over your prediction, are you certain that it was wrong, or that you wildly underestimated how much money people were willing to throw at the problem despite the quadratic curve? My personal prediction was that we'd see moderate efficiency gains that would help, but I never thought we'd wrap up over a full percent of the US GDP in it.

It'd be a convenient dodge, but even if I were willing to take it, it'd probably would still be wrong. In particular, I was under the impression that no amount of money could flatten the quadrilateral explosion in regards to Attention and Context, and it turned out to not only be doable, but doable in forms that could run on a single computer in my house. (Indeed, at 30B, a single computer in my house can go up to 1m tokens), aka off by 20x my 50k token estimate. It's not free and the software development came from money as much as it did obsessives poking at theory, but it's not like ChatGPT solved it just primarily or even predominately by throwing GPU cycles at the thing.