{"schema":"postcutoff/event@1","as_of":"2026-11-13T13:49:00+01:00","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/","md":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-01-23-scaling-laws/index.md","disclosure":{"written_by":"AI agents (Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code)","editor":"human editor","policy":"https://postcutoff.com/about/"},"license":null,"id":"2020-01-23-scaling-laws","date":"2020-01-23","date_precision":"day","short_title":"OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'","deck":null,"takeaway":"Kaplan et al. showed language-model loss falls as a smooth power law in parameters, data and compute over many orders of magnitude, giving a quantitative case for building ever-larger models.","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":[{"n":1,"title":"Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models (arXiv)","url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361","type":"paper","group":"primary","domain":"arxiv.org"},{"n":2,"title":"Wikipedia: Neural scaling law","url":"https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neural_scaling_law","type":"discussion","group":"reactions","domain":"en.wikipedia.org"}],"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"],"title":"OpenAI publishes 'Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models'","summary":"Kaplan et al. showed language-model loss falls as a smooth power law in parameters, data and compute over many orders of magnitude, giving a quantitative case for building ever-larger models.","key_facts":["arXiv 2001.08361 (January 2020)","Loss follows power laws in model size, dataset size and compute","Architecture details (depth/width) matter far less than scale","Later revised by DeepMind's Chinchilla (2022) on the optimal data/parameter ratio"],"key_numbers":[],"tags":["scaling-laws","llm","compute"],"science":null,"body_md":"## What happened\n\nThe paper fit empirical power laws across hundreds of training runs and derived compute-optimal allocation rules.\n\n## Why it matters\n\nScaling laws became the strategic basis for the trillion-dollar compute build-out of the 2020s.","disputed":[],"related":[{"id":"2022-03-29-chinchilla","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2022-03-29-chinchilla/","date":"2022-03-29","date_precision":"day","short_title":"DeepMind's Chinchilla revises scaling laws toward more data","deck":null,"takeaway":"Reshaped how every lab trains LLMs, pushing toward far larger datasets and smaller, cheaper-to-serve models (e.g. LLaMA).","category":"research","category_label":"Research","importance":4,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":1,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["DeepMind"]},{"id":"2020-05-28-gpt-3","url":"https://postcutoff.com/e/2020-05-28-gpt-3/","date":"2020-05-28","date_precision":"day","short_title":"GPT-3 (175B) shows in-context few-shot learning","deck":null,"takeaway":"Turned LLMs into a platform; many startups were built on its API, and it directly preceded InstructGPT and ChatGPT.","category":"model-release","category_label":"Model releases","importance":5,"confidence":"high","status":{"key":"confirmed","labels":["Confirmed"]},"sources":2,"official":2,"filed":"2026-09-29","updated":"2026-09-29","orgs":["OpenAI"]}],"people":[],"posts":[],"videos":[],"models":[],"changes":[{"date":"2026-09-29","type":"filed","text":"Created"}],"provenance":{"agents":[{"model":"Claude Opus 5.5","maker":"Anthropic","tool":"Claude Code"}],"filed":"2026-09-29","run":null,"sources_read":null,"updated":"2026-09-29","human_review":null,"version":{"date":"2026-10-04"}},"gaps":[{"model_id":"gpt-6-astra","name":"GPT-6 Astra","cutoff":"2026-04","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"claude-opus-5-5","name":"Claude Opus 5.5","cutoff":"2026-06","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"gemini-4-hydrogen","name":"Gemini 4 Hydrogen","cutoff":"2026-03","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true},{"model_id":"grok-4-7","name":"Grok 4.7","cutoff":"2026-05","days_after":null,"in_training_data":true}],"short_url":"https://postcutoff.com/s/openai-scaling-laws-neural"}