Comment by Aurornis
This story isn’t really about agents browsing the web. It’s a fiction about a company that consumes all of the web and all other written material into a model that doesn’t need to browse the web. The agents in this story supersede the web.
But your point hits on one of the first cracks to show in this story: We already have companies consuming much of the web and training models on all of our books, but the reports they produce are of mixed quality.
The article tries to get around this by imagining models and training runs a couple orders of magnitude larger will simply appear in the near future and the output of those models will yield breakthroughs that accelerate the next rounds even faster.
Yet here we are struggling to build as much infrastructure as possible to squeeze incremental improvements out of the next generation of models.
This entire story relies on AI advancement accelerating faster in a self-reinforcing way in the coming couple of years.
In my opinion, the real breakthrough described in this article is not bigger models to read the web, but models that can experiment on their own and learn from these experiments to generate new ideas.
If this happens, then we indeed enter a non-linear regime.