Dwarkesh Patel's "sample efficiency black hole": data, not architecture, drives the next gains.

In a June 8 essay, Patel defines intelligence as sample efficiency, argues models have barely improved on it, and says the real gains come from widening data distribution and scaling the compute that manufactures data (RL reframed as verifier-guided synthetic data). His conclusion, that data is why open-source laggards catch the frontier within months, already drew a published information-theory rebuttal. Live debate, not settled fact, but a useful lens on why the open-weight gap keeps closing.