Lilian Weng’s Deep Dive Overturns Three Years of Large‑Model Scaling Law Assumptions
In a ten‑thousand‑word analysis, former OpenAI safety VP Lilian Weng retraces the history of model scaling laws from Kaplan’s 2020 formulation, demonstrates how DeepMind’s Chinchilla overturns the original parameter‑to‑data ratio, uncovers two critical bugs in the Chinchilla paper, and warns that the impending 2026‑2028 data wall makes naïve scaling of parameters and compute unsustainable.
