Two intuitions about AI progress: one key insight, or just enough compute

From the conversation

And it seems like that's often the case for other technologies that's pretty piecemeal. But a lot of people do seem to have the intuition that maybe there's something that looks like a single intellectual insight, that if we could have it, would allow us to jump forward. I think there's also almost the opposite sort of line of argument, where I think some people have the intuition that in some sense, AI progress is mostly about having enough compute power to do interesting things. Maybe the more intellectual stuff, or maybe the more sort of algorithmic improvement stuff doesn't really matter that much. Or maybe it's almost sort of downstream of computing power improvements. And I think people who have this view, I think there's a few different ways it can go. I think one intuition that some people have is if in some sense computing power is the main thing that drives AI progress, then at some point there'll be some level of computing power, such that when we have that level of computing power, we'll just have AI systems that can at least an aggregate, do all the stuff that people can do.…