[AINews] 10% worse, 100x cheaper, 10000x faster: Why Simulation is taking over
AI pipeline components are flipping from human-made to model-made via simulation annually since 2022.
“what we used to call "synthetic data" and "synthetic rubrics" and "AI researcher" and "end to end RL environments" is just increasingly ambitious human simulation - 10% worse, but 100x cheaper and 10,000x faster.”
Latent Space argues that each year since 2022, one more component of the AI training pipeline has flipped from human-produced to model-produced, tracing a progression from reward models (2022) through synthetic data and beyond. The unifying frame is 'human simulation': synthetic substitutes that are 10% worse in quality but orders of magnitude cheaper and faster. This mental model has significant implications for how frontier labs scale and what bottlenecks remain human-gated.