And then we hit a wall.
Nobody expected it. Well... almost nobody. Yann LeCun posted his "I told you so's" all over X. Gary Marcus insisted he'd predicted this all along. Sam Altman pivoted, declaring o3 was actually already ASI.
The first rumors of scaling laws breaking down were already circulating in late 2024. By late 2025, it was clear that test-time scaling was not coming to the rescue. Despite the scaling labs' best efforts, nobody could figure out how to generalize reasoning beyond the comfortable confines of formally verifiable domains. Sure, you could train reasoning models on math and a little bit on coding, but that was it — transformers had reached their limits.
Or so we thought. It turned out there was still plenty of room to explore in the high reaches of mathematics. Building on foundations laid by o1, Minerva, and AlphaProof, DeepMind's [...]
First published:
January 25th, 2025
Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/XvyAeymaRi95MSLZD/the-rising-sea)
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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO).
