Scaling law
Predictable power-law relationships between model size, compute and loss.
What it commits you to
Scaling laws made it possible to forecast capability from a training run's budget rather than from its results, which is a capability in itself and a governance problem in particular. They also motivated the expectation that everything improves smoothly with scale, which the field's own surprise results — AlphaGo's move 37, weak-to-strong generalisation — have repeatedly contradicted.
Which realms lean on this
The vocabulary of measurement, and therefore of the disagreements measurement cannot settle.
technical · 1 realm — The Longview Foundry.
Canon that discusses this
primary · 1274
Summa Theologiae
A systematic theology in three parts, of which the second — law, justice, and the common good — is the part that enters every later argument about legitimate authority. Its claim that an unjust law is not a law at all makes legitimacy a property of the rule's structure rather than of the body that enacted it.
primary · 1785
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals
Written in under five months in 1785 and deliberately unreadable, on Kant's own account, because he wanted it to be hard. One maxim is tested three ways — as a universal law, humanity as an end in itself, and the kingdom of ends — and the ground of obligation is the form of the act, never its consequence.
modern · 1950
The Human Use of Human Beings
Wiener applies the theory of feedback and control to law, politics and medicine, and argues that communication is more fundamental than command. The book that gave cybernetics its name in 1948 becomes, two years later, the founding text of the ethics of steering large systems without crushing what they steer. The excerpt below paraphrases the book rather than quoting it.
primary · 1781
Critique of Pure Reason
The first Critique bounds theoretical reason: the synthetic a priori is real, and it reaches only the phenomenal. The second edition of 1787 reorganises the book around the transcendental deduction. The famous closing passage about the starry heavens and the moral law belongs to the Critique of Practical Reason (1788), not this one. The excerpt below paraphrases the programme rather than quoting a translation.
See also
Emergent capability
technicalA capability that appears abruptly above a scale threshold rather than gradually.
Goodhart's law
alignmentWhen a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure.
Compute governance
governanceGoverning the hardware that trains frontier systems rather than the software.
Transformer
technicalThe attention-based architecture underlying essentially all current large models.