Transformers were pretty novel in 2017, I don’t know if they were really around before that.

Anyway, I’m doubtful that a larger corpus is what’s needed at this point. (Though that said, there’s a lot more text remaining in instant messager chat logs like discord that probably have yet to be integrated into LLMs. Not sure.) I’m also doubtful that scaling up is going to keep working, but it wouldn’t surprise that much me if it does keep working for a long while. My guess is that there’s some small tweaks to be discovered that really improve things a lot but still basically like like repetitive training as you put it.