Before the scaling-laws insight, the speaker found AI's direction unclear from afar, even though it raised interesting philosophical questions.

“had had some appreciation that AI was a big deal but it kind of felt it raised all these kind of interesting philosophical questions but it's kind of not clear from afar where exactly that would go but it was obvious enough that it was like this is going to be a big thing if we find the kind of right mechanism to kind of get the techno capital machine to work on this but it was just not clear and so I think there's some way in which like”