Big Blob of Compute: The Essay That Started the AI Race
The Essay That Started the AI Race“Big Blob of Compute,” a 2017 internal research memo by Dario Amodei, convinced OpenAI to go all-in on scaling. They’d build specialized models to go after specific, narrow problems: language translation, speech recognition, robotics, games. Each of these domains required different algorithms, different data sets, and different approaches.
- ▪The Essay That Started the AI Race“Big Blob of Compute,” a 2017 internal research memo by Dario Amodei, convinced OpenAI to go all-in on scaling.
- ▪They’d build specialized models to go after specific, narrow problems: language translation, speech recognition, robotics, games.
- ▪Each of these domains required different algorithms, different data sets, and different approaches.
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| Original publisher | Hacker News (AI / LLM) |
| Canonical URL | https://kevinroose.substack.com/p/the-essay-that-started-the-ai-race |
| Publication time | Tue, 06 Oct 2026 06:51:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-06T07:00:06.637Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-06T07:00:06.637Z |
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The Essay That Started the AI Race“Big Blob of Compute,” a 2017 internal research memo by Dario Amodei, convinced OpenAI to go all-in on scaling. It’s published here for the first time.Kevin RooseOct 06, 202640710ShareThis is what AI thinks a “big blob of compute” looks likeIn 2017, a curly-haired OpenAI researcher named Dario Amodei had a hunch.At the time — and keep in mind, 2017 was a bygone era in AI research, just after AlphaGo but just before GPT-1 and the LLM revolution — most AI researchers still thought of themselves as toolmakers. They’d build specialized models to go after specific, narrow problems: language translation, speech recognition, robotics, games. Each of these domains required different algorithms, different data sets, and different approaches.
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