An AI Pioneer Worries Big Tech Is Blinding Itself to New Breakthroughs

The article discusses the concerns of Ashish Vaswani, an AI pioneer, about the direction of modern AI development. Vaswani, who was a key figure in the development of the Transformer architecture, which underpins many of today's most advanced AI systems, believes that the focus on large language models and supervised learning may be limiting the potential for new breakthroughs. Vaswani argues that the current approach of training massive models on vast datasets may have reached a point of diminishing returns, and that there is a need to explore alternative approaches, such as unsupervised learning and reinforcement learning. He suggests that the narrow focus on a few dominant approaches by the big tech companies may be blinding the field to other promising avenues of research. The article highlights Vaswani's concerns about the potential negative consequences of the AI industry's obsession with scale and the dominance of a few players, and his call for a more diverse and open-minded approach to AI research and development.