Both matter, and returns fall off as you go further in one but not the other. The Chinchilla paper[0] established a simple scaling law for Large Language Models

Both matter, and returns fall off as you go further in one but not the other. The Chinchilla paper[0] established a simple scaling law for Large Language Models: model size and training tokens should grow at the same pace. Compute is then proportional to the product of model size & data quantity. That said, quality of data also matters a lot - OpenAI has had human labelers produce the data for their Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), which has probably had a disproportionate impact on the success of ChatGPT compared to previous models, but that data is probably O(1%) of what they trained on. At this point I'm guessing OpenAI are limited by both data & compute. Rumor has it they're training the "next big thing" now and it won't finish until December. If they had more compute they could presumably finish sooner, and if they had more data they would presumably let it train longer. [0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556 https://arxiv.org/abs/2203.15556