Learn to use AI

Scaling

Scaling is a unit of 7 lessons in Rabbithole's Learn to use AI course, at levels 1 to 2. The same lessons are also in Become an AI engineer as “Scaling, plainly”.

Lessons

1. Bigger models: what size buys youLevel 1
2. Pretraining: where an AI's knowledge comes fromLevel 2
3. Sample efficiency: how little data it takes to learnLevel 2
4. Training compute: what it costs to build an AILevel 2
5. Double descent: when getting worse comes before getting betterLevel 2
6. Scaling laws: how AI gets better as it growsLevel 2
7. Emergent abilities: skills that appear as models growLevel 2

Sources

These lessons draw on 24 sources. The most used:

• Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models
• Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models
• International AI Safety Report 2026
• Stanford CS25 V4 — Jason Wei and Hyung Won Chung of OpenAI
• How I use LLMs
• Are Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models a Mirage?
• Deep Double Descent: Where Bigger Models and More Data Hurt
• Ilya Sutskever — moving from the age of scaling to the age of research

All units in Learn to use AI