>GPT-2 is two orders of magnitude smaller. In terms of forebrain neuron count this is the difference between a human and an elephant shrew or budgerigar. It was absolutely expected by reasonable people that 2 OOMs of scaling will provide a qualitative jump.

When GPT-3 was released, it was by far the largest artificial neural network ever trained. And I mean by far. Now there wasn't any big jump in hardware capabilities to spur this sort of gulf. It wasn't a case of "Oh now we can train a very large model"

So Want to know why there was such a gap ? It's because most researchers assumed the models would overfit the data or display diminishing returns long before 175b.

Brain neurons are not comparable to ann parameters.