-There had been a post in the Sequences that made fun of "the people who just want to build a really big neural net." These days, it's increasingly looking like just building a really big neural net ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.
+In part of the Sequences, Yudkowsky had been [dismissive of people who aspired to build AI without understanding how intelligence works](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence)—for example, by being overly impressed by the [surface analogy](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/6ByPxcGDhmx74gPSm/surface-analogies-and-deep-causes) between artificial neural networks and the brain. He conceded the possibility of brute-forcing AI (if natural selection had eventually gotten there with no deeper insight, so could we) but didn't consider it a default and especially not a desirable path. (["If you don't know how your AI works, that is not good. It is bad."](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fKofLyepu446zRgPP/artificial-mysterious-intelligence))
+
+These days, it's increasingly looking like making really large neural nets ... [actually works](https://www.gwern.net/Scaling-hypothesis)?—which seems like bad news; if it's "easy" for non-scientific-genius engineering talent to shovel large amounts of compute into the birth of powerful minds that we don't understand and don't know how to control, then it would seem that the world is soon to pass outside of our understanding and control.