Simple models and a lot of data trump elaborate models

In their 2009 IEEE Intelligent Systems essay “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Data,” Google researchers Alon Halevy, Peter Norvig, and Fernando Pereira wrote that “invariably, simple models and a lot of data trump more elaborate models based on less data.” The line became a widely quoted statement of the data-first approach to AI, years before the formal scaling laws of the 2020s.