Homogeneity and correlated failures

"Homogeneity and Correlated Failures. The current paradigm driving the state of the art in AI is the ‘foundation model’ (Bommasani et al., 2021): large-scale ML models pre-trained on broad data, which can be repurposed for a wide range of downstream applications. The costs required to create such models (and continuing returns to scale) means that only well-resourced actors can create cutting- edge models (Epoch, 2023; Hoffmann et al., 2022; Kaplan et al., 2020), making them relatively few in number. If current trends continue, it is likely that many AI agents will be powered by a small number of similar underlying models.28"