Yeah, I greatly respect him too. I've been exposed to his ideas for years.

Its not that it wouldn't work if we did what he suggests. Its that we can't do it. It's just too easy to replicate for any group with rather modest resources. There are individual buildings that were more expensive than SOTA LLM models.

The toothpaste is out if the tube with transformers and large language models. I don't think most people, even most researchers had any idea that it would be this "easy" to make this much progress in AI. That's why everyone's guesses were 2050+. I've heard eople with PhDs confidently say "not in this century" within the last 5-10 years.

Heck, Ray Kurzweil looks like a conservative or at least median in this current timeline (I never thought I would type that out).