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chrismorgan 19 hours ago [-]
This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load).
Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.
(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
zamadatix 14 hours ago [-]
100k prize announcement for a competition right up a HN writer's alley and the top discussion on it is how the announcement page doesn't load correctly on a browser with half the features disabled. We are truly a special group :D.
hansvm 13 hours ago [-]
I have a fully functional, updated Chrome derivative with all the features enabled, and they went out of their way to dynamically load a
Update your browser to access this website
message as the only visible content rather than test features (which they're clearly doing to GP, so how much work would it be to properly use that feature testing as the main tool for compatability checking) or just letting the browser try to load it -- displaying one of those big-tech "update your browser now" nag messages if they really feel the need to be annoying.
chrismorgan 13 hours ago [-]
That message is triggered by checking for support of the CSS light-dark() function and :has() selector:
Are you sure your browser is fully functional and updated? Chromium shipped the last part of that incantation two and a half years ago.
chrismorgan 14 hours ago [-]
It’s currently at +39. I did not expect that! I expected it to settle at the bottom like something that settles at the bottom—I dunno, detritus, lees, Titanic, something like that.
Still, I’ll take the opportunity to advocate for turning off fonts. Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been using the web so for 6½ years and it makes it so much better.
hansvm 13 hours ago [-]
It probably just literally doesn't work for most people. If you click through, see a broken page, and see that the top comment thinks the way in which it's broken is interesting, that'll probably be more interesting to engage with than the contents of the page.
chrismorgan 13 hours ago [-]
From the code, it looks like it’s only broken if you have a browser more than about two and a half years old, JavaScript disabled, or fonts disabled. Even on HN, I would expect that to be under 5% of viewers, surely under 10%, and people that turn off JS are used to the occasional page not working (though it’s happily less common than it was five years ago).
aand16 13 hours ago [-]
+40
I hate websites that do stupid stuff. My latest pet peeve is Qwen's blog, when I pinch to zoom, to be able to read their tiny graphs, there is a black bar that progressively covers the entire page.
soulofmischief 10 hours ago [-]
We should not accept defeat when it comes to accessibility, graceful degradation and adherence to standards.
peri-cl 15 hours ago [-]
I circumvented it with this one-liner (credit to DSV4 0731, who kindly read the minified scripts for me). I got it to work by injecting it at the console after a refresh, and before the scripts finished loading (there's probably more robust ways but I'm lazy and this does work).
This is what happens when the world has a gpu per person
huangm 16 hours ago [-]
Sorry, we’ll fix!
alpha_squared 14 hours ago [-]
This should be a pretty simple 1-line CSS fix, just default to standard system fonts if the "dg" font isn't available.
chrismorgan 13 hours ago [-]
No, it’s loading the font in JS for some reason (rather than a regular @font-face) and going out of its way to break the page if that fails, rather than ignoring it as it should. `font-family: dg` is fine, it’ll fall back to the user’s default font (which will typically be serif).
sebastos 14 hours ago [-]
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.
This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.
chrismorgan 14 hours ago [-]
The only reason I commented this was because the specific breakage was novel. And it’s rare for this specific type of comment to rank highly. Apparently this one is unusually interesting to others, or something? Beats me.
sebastos 13 hours ago [-]
Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance.
It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.
…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.
chrismorgan 13 hours ago [-]
Fortunately it’s easy to collapse the tree. And the mods do often override trees like this to default to collapsed.
bbor 14 hours ago [-]
I think you deserve a rule bending or two every once in a while, as a fine HN citizen in good standing. They're not even linked prominently, so the fact that they even exist for a site that doesn't justify moderation actions feels a bit like Eternal September Keyfabe
algoth1 18 hours ago [-]
Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js
FuriouslyAdrift 16 hours ago [-]
Privacy Badger didn't show any trackers.
megagpt1 14 hours ago [-]
Font-based fingerprinting is a thing too
HNDevsSuck 17 hours ago [-]
[dead]
NitpickLawyer 1 days ago [-]
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.
> Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
The more I use Fable the more impressed I am with it. I am still learning how to use it, same with gpt-5.6-sol. I don't think the model has changed much, but both models have gotten smarter in leaps and bounds as I've improved the documentation, context, how I provide work to them and how I specify success.
(And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.)
I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.
benfortuna 21 hours ago [-]
>I am still learning how to use it
I find it interesting that we are still talking in terms of modifying our behaviour to accommodate the tools. Surely the point of LLMs is not to "learn how to use it" but as an extension of our own unique capabilities - the most personalised tool in all of history.
siffin 21 hours ago [-]
The point of any tool is to learn how to use it best. That's the difference between slicing off your arm, or building a chair.
LLMs don't read minds. There's always a chasm between you (your ideas) and them becoming reality. Exactly how people cross that chasm is all the rage right now, and there are a million ways to do it - but just expecting the LLM to pull details out of a few words isn't going to produce anything decent.
embedding-shape 21 hours ago [-]
You're gonna need both to be able to work with it effectively though, just like working with your hands and wood isn't the same as working with abstract architectures via characters and words on a screen, like we've done since the beginning of programming with English language rather than just numbers and formulations, like how it was in the beginning.
Going further, even programming languages "asks" that you change the way you work to make the most use of them. A Clojure developer has a very different development process than a Rust developer, and they're both efficient, right and correct in their ecosystem, but the experience differs vastly and Clojure for example would change you to fit itself, rather than the opposite.
jaggederest 21 hours ago [-]
I think I would actually characterize it as a mutual change - obviously the model doesn't change as far as I can tell, but changing the harness and context changes its behavior so wildly that it might as well. Bit of a pas de deux - I learn, I change the context to teach it, it teaches me in turn, rinse and repeat.
mc3301 22 hours ago [-]
I finished reading it recently, too. I thought it was quirky, delightful, and obviously exaggerated for entertainment and contemplation purposes. I've recommended it to a bunch of people, too!
It triggered one of my favorite weird activities: after reading a book that I fully enjoyed and feel was completely "worth it," I give myself a few days to float on that happy feeling. Then, I go look at specifically only one and two star reviews. And laugh. Man, some people hated that book!
Note that otherwise, as a rule, I basically never read reviews of entertainment, restaurants, hotels and similar before nor after. I'm just not interested.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
>but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
With were AI agent clusters already are I'd say they have reached superhuman capabilities in a number of metrics. I for example am not going to go toe to toe writing exploits against the best models we have out. Faster and cheaper just means they can pear down and explore the problem space even faster than I already can.
abrookewood 24 hours ago [-]
Haven't read that one yet, but his Children of Time series is sooo good.
yitchelle 24 hours ago [-]
Yes, that book is a stark reminder (or prediction).
ideasman42 23 hours ago [-]
I couldn't believe it when the "real" news headline was reported - destructively scanning books.
I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
jaggederest 22 hours ago [-]
Down the pipe, I think it's medium likely we'll start destructively scanning humans. Wild stuff, honestly.
maxnevermind 22 hours ago [-]
> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like?
If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
setopt 21 hours ago [-]
I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
maxnevermind 20 hours ago [-]
> I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
Yes, for a verifiable domains you can set up a harness and brute-force a search space if you have enough money for compute. Why do you think they keep coming up with those examples of impressive achievements like solving math puzzles? Why not focus on something with economic value to it? My answer is they can't, those are hard problems, those require building an actual product, those require reliability.
> EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
We are not people people on the street we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
xerlait 20 hours ago [-]
I generally side with your skepticism, but there are verifiable domains with economic value such as drug discovery.
flerovium114 19 hours ago [-]
Are LLMs doing drug discovery? To my knowledge, that’s all classic “machine learning”
setopt 16 hours ago [-]
Not yet, as far as I know, but perhaps someone will find a way to do that in the future. We're talking about the next two decades here, a lot can happen in that time.
DNA itself can be thought of as a language which describes proteins, and I personally don't know enough about the limits of LLMs as a technology to claim that it can never be adapted to, say, do reverse translation from desired protein shapes into DNA sequences.
pixl97 14 hours ago [-]
This is why it's better to call the underlying technology transformers rather than 'language model'. It can make a model from anything you can digitize and is informational (random noise would not be informational for example). It's the relations between the bits of data that matters.
wjnc 21 hours ago [-]
I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity.
The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)
knollimar 20 hours ago [-]
Construction isn't using LLMs any time soon like that. We don't even send our files in structured data because everyone's playing nose goes for liability and sending pdfs
wjnc 18 hours ago [-]
I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.
An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.
knollimar 17 hours ago [-]
The LEAN example is the ideal case. It's like a baby POC to me.
I can only assume the only realistic way to get all the federated data will be a ton of massivr vertical consolidation of industry by hubris laden tech execs crossing industry domains.
wjnc 14 hours ago [-]
In spirit of this conversation - Terence Tao is awesome right? He was already one of the best mathematicians on the planet when he happened to start dabbling in computer assisted proofs (obviously as a giant standing on the shoulders of giants) at exactly the right time for the computer revolution to find a perfect use case (as you point out).
_superposition_ 18 hours ago [-]
Most notably Paul Krugman Nobel winning economist in 98:
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."
Predicting the future is hard.
voncheese 16 hours ago [-]
Hadn't seen this quote before, amazing.
Also goes to show how hard it is to predict anything that is a massive change - these levels of changes are so infrequent that we can't rely on priors to predict the future.
megagpt1 14 hours ago [-]
What will be LLMs' social media?
setopt 60 minutes ago [-]
More or less the same as social media but for agents, perhaps?
When I want to book an airline ticket in the future, I expect my LLM agent to contact the airline LLM agent, and the two to discuss options and negotiate a deal on my behalf.
dclowd9901 15 hours ago [-]
I don't think you've said anything different than the person you're responding to. The difference primarily seems to be whether you think AI is transformative vs simply being another tool (which is really just a matter of perspective).
If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.
stevepotter 11 hours ago [-]
I’m an expert software engineer. I would categorize something that multiplies my productivity by > 2x is transformative. AI has certainly done that and more for me
roel_v 21 hours ago [-]
This take is unfathomable to me. How are LLMs not massively revolutionary, despite them not being infallible? This comment reminds me of there being competitions for finding useful purposes for electricity when it was first discovered. Imagine talking about the usefulness of LLMs while thinking that LLMs in 2026 just compress a few TB of data into a set of weights and that's all they work with lol.
entropy47 21 hours ago [-]
Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick.
I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
david-gpu 20 hours ago [-]
Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
entropy47 20 hours ago [-]
It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways.
I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
ipsod 17 hours ago [-]
> I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to.
You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn?
Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search.
That's pretty far from nobody.
HarlequinHair 16 hours ago [-]
I think the first parent post all this conversation originated from, pointed that LLMs are not groundbreaking inventions.
If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't.
AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them.
Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat.
If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
ipsod 16 hours ago [-]
> If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it.
This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid. Because of the enormous cost, it can't be left to "hope they'll find it useful," and has to be pushed like crazy, or we're going to be left with a train system with no goods or passengers, and no path into the future.
Personally, having AI as an intelligence I can call like it's a library from apps I build... and to help build those apps... I feel that the future is as bright as the sun. I've always believed in software, but I feel like a chef that's just discovered salt and butter.
I don't know what it means for the world stage, but I believe that software is the highest art, and it's just had an incalculably massive buff. As an artist, I am stoked. The possibilities for creation of good things are limitless, and if you can't see that, I can't help you.
However, I wouldn't necessarily invest in AI companies. I don't know how this all fits into the rest of the world, except that I believe in my own ability to make products, same as I ever did, but now with AI.
HarlequinHair 13 hours ago [-]
> This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid.
Except that for railroads I don't need people to convince me about how/when/why it can be useful.
Railroads came out to solve an issue we had (and then it evolved).
LLMs are not giving us any new solution, just different speed (better) and quality (worse) to solve things we co&ld already solve.
It's basically the same concept as fast fashion.
Worse quality, more speed, possibly more economic.
You can change your wardrobe possibly every year, but you will never wear good quality clothes.
Now you can write code at impressive speed, but it is worse in quality, and you need to review it more often than "normal" code.
AI code should always be fully reviewed and put into the correct context to make it useful, otherwise long term problems will void short term benefits
ipsod 12 hours ago [-]
Nobody convinced me AI was useful. At this point, nobody could convince me it wasn't - it's like going from whittling stuff out of wood to having a kitted-out fully-manned machine shop.
It's clear from your words you lack experience and skill in this area - you've only got opinions.
HarlequinHair 10 hours ago [-]
My "only" experience happen to be coding 5 days a week with agentic AI, plus reviews.
Only because I do not share your point of view it doesn't mean I lack experience or skills.
You are pretty fast at jumping at conclusions.
ipsod 5 hours ago [-]
I guess we might actually have similar feelings, except, you say "only speed", and "only economics". Only time and only money. As if those aren't two of the most valuable currencies on earth.
ipsod 10 hours ago [-]
> You are pretty fast at jumping at conclusions.
Yeah, because I can see some of my own thoughts and experience from a long time ago in your words, and my experience tells me loud and clear that they're outdated and wrong.
david-gpu 13 hours ago [-]
If people use [the Internet] to replace [Sears catalogs] or [paper mail], you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't.
HarlequinHair 12 hours ago [-]
It would have been a good counter-example, if only internet wasn't:
- adding encryption
- removing processing time
- removing geography
- removing logistic issues
... and much more at a convenient price.
They basically invented teleportation for sear catalogs and paper mail, can you see how this is different?
Also, Internet was built to solve a problem we had, and it solved it beautifully and at reasonable prices.
I for sure can understand it introduced different issues, buy this is another topic.
david-gpu 11 hours ago [-]
You can ask LLMs questions about an immense variety of subjects, and they can give you customized explanations to those questions. It is as if an acquaintance of yours had digested Wikipedia and tens of thousands of books and had infinite patience to help you understand whatever you are curious about. And while the answers are not going to be picture perfect every time, just like Wikipedia or a well-educated acquaintance, they will be generally very useful.
I understand exactly what the Internet of the 90s did and did not do, because I was there to witness it myself. I had these same types of conversations with naysayers back then. Guess who was right?
HarlequinHair 10 hours ago [-]
Maybe you have all the means to avoid sycophancy bias and other flaws LLMs have by design, this doesn't mean that everyone can use it the same way.
The fact the you were right in a previous topic, doesn't grant you objective truth.
You have your strong opinions on AI, and that's ok.
Fortunately not everyone has to share the same idea.
If you think LLMs can do better than you, feel free to use them in production and bring them to work with you, it's your choice.
Do not force others do the same, tho.
calgoo 18 hours ago [-]
From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.
maxnevermind 20 hours ago [-]
> Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons.
Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories:
1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes.
The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
aa-jv 19 hours ago [-]
>Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.
I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)
It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.
Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
kakacik 19 hours ago [-]
Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search.
My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.
Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.
For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
roel_v 19 hours ago [-]
How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?
stevepotter 19 hours ago [-]
Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.
roel_v 18 hours ago [-]
But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.
stevepotter 11 hours ago [-]
I think we agree. I think we’ve barely touched the surface on its applications. It’s digitized reasoning. That’s hard to wrap one’s head around. My hope is that the vertical applications that gain traction aren’t from a handful of companies.
cemkum 20 hours ago [-]
The TAM of electricity is 99.999% of humanity, yet there was 82 years between Alessandro Volta's Voltaic Pile experiments and the first electrical grid in the world, Pearl Street Station, New York City.
A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is not a lot of work in this space right now, because programming and math are infinitely more verifiable, and the capabilities of never models would probably invalidate any usecases, but if the model progress slows down, all attention will go towards making them work for any aspect of production.
entropy47 20 hours ago [-]
Fair points (and I appreciate very much that they read like a human wrote them). As a counter point - and I know it's a weak one - a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.
I want to believe there is big bucks in this technology - my employer is tied up in it and so is my compensation. I just find it personally very unremarkable in a way that I never did with phones or the internet. When I got my first phone, or first started using Dogpile for research - I saw immediate value, and would have paid big bucks to keep it in my life. AI has had a few years and a huge amount of investment (time and money) and if it disappeared overnight I wouldn't pay $10 to get it back. I keep trying it, there's just something missing in my brain where it should be clicking for me :(
munksbeer 15 hours ago [-]
> a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.
As you say, that is a weak counter point. I do get what you're saying, but crypto flaws were built in from the start:
- Deflationary currency isn't going to be spent, it is going to be hoarded, if it would have any value at all. The design was self defeating from the very start.
- Technical limits of PoW. Obvious right from the start, which led to the block wars. PoS "solves" that but with other costs. And it still doesn't solve the first point.
Despite these, crypto did get adopted, just not in any way that crypto maximalists said it would. It got hoarded, as expected.
But the real test is: If crypto disappeared tomorrow, would the world notice or really care? I would argue, apart from people losing money, most of the world wouldn't even notice it was gone.
There is no way you could say that for LLMs.
TimMurnaghan 18 hours ago [-]
Nitpick or two. Holborn in London was a little earlier. Also neither was really a grid. That took another ~45 years. Maybe that's better for your argument - but I'm not quite sure that the analogy fully holds - as it's a different class of infrastructure problem.
pixl97 13 hours ago [-]
>but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester.
Eh, I'd say there is a lot more stuff like this being developed these days. Autonomous seeders are becoming more common and (semi-)autonomous tractors are in use.
I'd say a very large part of the in field work can be done now, and is using enhancements like vision models to identify potential problems that crop up to notify humans. It's when the machines have to interact in tight busy spaces or with non-farm traffic that control is handed over to a human.
bsenftner 18 hours ago [-]
That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.
titzer 16 hours ago [-]
We're still in early stages, but in just 2 years AI has presented higher education with the single most disruptive change in decades. Now a computer can do your entire coursework for you, is available to converse on a broad range of topics, and can accomplish unaided huge open-ended problems.
> most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications.
Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed.
Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
_superposition_ 15 hours ago [-]
Let's not forget the electric car... Still yet to be realized at scale but looking more likely.
madaxe_again 19 hours ago [-]
It took the better part of a century for people to go from “hey look a steam engine” to “why don’t we put it on wheels?”.
Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”
TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.
The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.
Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
pixl97 13 hours ago [-]
Oh, based on the METR report we're beyond a talking computer. Like most technology it's just not spread evenly.
madaxe_again 10 hours ago [-]
We absolutely are - but we’re still at the “weirdo factory owner installs experimental electric motor” stage. You look at what’s going on in robotics, look at GROOT/Isaac, and the circle closes quite neatly. World’s going to change in ways we can barely even imagine, no more than someone in 1720 could imagine the buffet car on an intercity express train.
Roark66 17 hours ago [-]
I'm with you on this. I remember when the Internet became a thing, how revolutionary it was to all areas of my life.
This is comparable.
While I dislike the bonkers valuations, and "were building Agi so it tells us how to be profitable" is onion worthy statement LLMs are an absolutely revolutionary technology.
Even with all the hallucinations.
Imagine telling someone 15 years ago Internet/Google is useless because people sometimes do not tell the truth online... It's like that.
I also hate the fact AI is being used as justification to grab all compute in the world and lock it up in one country's datacenters.
I hope this endeavour fails, but sadly being realistic I have to admit I think the so called "AI bubble" will not pop. Instead the companies will be bailed out with printed money.
I recently looked up there are approximately $20Trillion in circulation. Even if they print extra $2T it will dilute existing money supply by 10%. So everyone that uses USD as a currency will pay for the datacenter build out wether we want it or not.
All the compute will be slurped from the market for this and companies like nvidia that get used to 50bln deals will never go back to making consumer stuff.
I never thought I'll live to see the PC revolution reverse, but that is what seems to be happening.
Gareth321 16 hours ago [-]
I strongly agree. I cannot understand how anyone could seriously use this technology and come away thinking it's mostly useless. I suspect there is a LOT of bias baked into their opinion.
onion2k 21 hours ago [-]
agent's failures on long horizon tasks
We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that.
The question really becomes "why would we want that?". The main reason you'd want an AI that can focus on a task forever is to completely remove the human from the loop. That's something we should be cautious about.
FinnKuhn 21 hours ago [-]
I do not think agents need to work continuously. They "just"
need to work on a project longer than an employee is able to
work on it for them to be commercially useful. Although this
does not consider that agents might take a shorter or longer
amount of time for the same task. Therefore, we should begin
to compare these in tasks completed during that time instead.
onion2k 18 hours ago [-]
Not sure about that. The nature of work changes if you have some[one|thing] that can work on it continuously forever. The goal of using AI shouldn't be to do the things a person does; it should be to do the things a person would be able to do if they had (practically) unlimited time.
This is one of the inflection points around working with AI. When your thinking shifts from "AI does what the person used to do" to "AI does something different that leads to the same outcome as before, but with all that cool stuff I'd love to have the time for", then the equation changes. For example, I will never write another app that doesn't have 100% test coverage again. I stress- and soak-test everything these days. That's changing how I write code - I need to write things in ways that have deterministic harnesses for things mutable state outside of my immediate control (like random numbers or datetimes or state loaded from a save) so that I can task AI with building a fuzzer that does tens of thousands of random tests on every push to see if anything broke. I couldn't do that in the past because it was always effort that a client wouldn't get enough value from to pay me to do it. I can do those things now. It's ace.
(Everywhere I put 'I' you can replace with 'AI of the Week')
bbmatryoshka 21 hours ago [-]
2 hours... of agent work, usually for the same output the average worker has to use much more time
knollimar 20 hours ago [-]
Throw understanding images in there and it becomes less true in my experience. Sure they shit out code and search text well, but one infographic and they circle trying to rasterize it.
Gareth321 16 hours ago [-]
My codex tasks regularly cross 8 hours, and I'm only using Sol High. It's not unusual for tasks to span much longer. It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete.
Anthropic and OpenAI are currently obsessed with getting humans out of the training and improvement loops. It's going to happen very soon and when it does I think we see staggering improvements in a very short space of time. Basically, the Singularity.
munksbeer 14 hours ago [-]
Are you breaking up your tasks and spawning new sessions for each, or are you just yoloing and letting it auto compact when it blows the context many times on such a long running task?
Gareth321 13 hours ago [-]
Yolo. I keep a large project markdown document + incident/logs/feature documents which its instructed to review and update as necessary. It still occasionally misses stuff but it's surprisingly effective. Disclaimer: this is for hobby software. For work I'm more cautious - usually.
bwfan123 15 hours ago [-]
> It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete
Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop. My experience with this is not encouraging. Getting it to work requires sprinkling some context magic and hoping and praying the LLM does the right thing. More astrology or religion and less science. Great for use cases with humans-in-the-loop, but less than impressive when you need determinism and reliable operation.
Gareth321 13 hours ago [-]
> Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop.
I would not use a sewing machine to repair my deck :) LLMs are non-deterministic, by design.
onion2k 13 hours ago [-]
LLMs are non-deterministic, by design.
They don't have to be though. You can give them a temperature of zero so they pick the highest-probability token every time to give you a deterministic output. I imagine this doesn't work on frontier models because there's a lot going on, but you can definitely do it with a small local model.
pazimzadeh 22 hours ago [-]
that's a lot of opinion without much reasoning/support
even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
embedding-shape 21 hours ago [-]
> LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all.
I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
It's also at the same time downplaying just how valuable "nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers" could be, just like computers did for us "highly motivated expert knowledge workers" in the first place. Or computers isn't a "foundational technology" either?
maxnevermind 20 hours ago [-]
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable. If you were a problem solver and entrepreneur you could go and apply those on small scale, get profits, reinvest, set up a flywheel, build a fortune on the top of those, there were a lot of low hanging fruit due to the fact that the foundation was laid out, a break-even period of James Watt steam engine was like 2-3 years I believe until everyone saw it and margins flattened. Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
pixl97 13 hours ago [-]
>Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.
Because mostly they are doing a limit number of tasks in a non-generic manner.
Railroads had all kinds of problems at first, from iron rails bending and skewering the riders to engines exploding like high pressure bombs cutting down swaths of people like grain. People still used them with those risks because taking a wagon was worse.
The internet itself is a pretty simple concept. It's "just" packet routing. Now, to make that reliable at scale we've added an enormous amount of complexity to it. If you talk an old TCP stack and dump it on todays internet it you'd find yourself hacked pretty quickly. The internet is a generic packet router, but not a generic anything router.
Computers is where the reliability starts to fall apart. Once you go from specialized purpose to general purpose the size of the problem space explodes. You wouldn't get companies called things like Micro$lop (and these things were from before the AI days).
Then when you get to AI/LLMs and especially when you push into AGI you're creating a do anything now machine. And when you can do anything it takes a lot of training to eliminate the choices that end badly. You are the endpoint of 500 million years of training, for example.
>Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
Can anyone do it now? You're talking about low hanging fruit 200 years ago, but how much of that is left? How much harder are we going to have to fight for the next apple up?
embedding-shape 20 hours ago [-]
> We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
Cool, you're still a person who share their thoughts, just like the people who had similar reactions to when computers and the internet first came around. So many people were railing against the internet with "You'll never make payments over the internet", "it's too slow" and whatever. To the surprise of none of us nerds, the internet eventually ate the whole world and now large swaths of the population can't imagine life without it, for better or worse.
> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.
You're comparing the reliability of huge ecosystems after they've gone mainstream, after decades, with something that is a couple of years old, hardly a fair comparison. Instead, compare where LLMs are today with the first years of computers, the internet and all that, and maybe you'll gain a new perspective on where LLMs are? None of those things were reliable initially and in many cases, involved actual human deaths before safety actually caught up.
Even when I got started with using the internet, which isn't that long time ago but around the modem-era, things were not so reliable or simple as they are today.
jstummbillig 21 hours ago [-]
The thing that would change it a lot is that people would start trading away their GPUs, because some people would get vastly more economic use out of them.
RajT88 16 hours ago [-]
This. Look at what happened when the government gave out free ATSC tuners for people with old TV's. eBay filled up with ATSC tuners. lol
lukan 19 hours ago [-]
"If we talk about just LLMs"
In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.
For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.
"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"
And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.
The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.
"but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures."
So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.
And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.
falcor84 21 hours ago [-]
> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes
Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.
maxnevermind 21 hours ago [-]
> there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities
Yes, but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.
Btw I meant bigger and bigger amount of data of extracted reasoning chains when you go deeper and generate more and more of them in your attempt to describe the universe, the amount of permutations explodes. And it seems LLMs can't workaround that because they don't build world model inside so they can't deduct it from pre-built world/object model, they must memorize it and look it up later.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
>but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.
I mean they kind of do by distilling said experience and putting it in the next model.
Current LLMs can't do it because building said world model is super expensive, anything that lowers that requirement brings us closer to continuous learning.
Also the models we train these days are typically generalized human text models. Animal models are a bit different because they won't be "word" models and they aren't going to be generalized text models like us humans use. In fact there is a story just today on HN about a user creating some rather simple transformer models to solve a number of the Arc-AGI problems not using (human) words at all. The reason you don't see more of this is most people aren't dumping compute into these kinds of issues, but instead going for the AGI prize.
smusamashah 20 hours ago [-]
Computers were made and automated lots of work, even though it was still us operating those computers and making and running those automations. But eventually computers took over and running so much of the world.
Now LLMs are automating the computers themselves. This is a whole new layer that we never had before, not in this amount or with this much availability. It is not "not foundational".
bsenftner 18 hours ago [-]
Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.
dgellow 21 hours ago [-]
Also, way more centralization, with all that logic pushed to a few AI vendors
holoduke 20 hours ago [-]
Absolutely untrue. LLM will be the automation force of everything. It will connect and orchestrate our entire society. It will be a much bigger impact that any other revolution in the past. Our lives will be unrecognizable in 10 years from now.
lacedeconstruct 20 hours ago [-]
In 10 years from now we will have another AI winter until a new thing arrives that pushes further.
ajjahs 14 hours ago [-]
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rixed 1 days ago [-]
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago.
Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
guax 24 hours ago [-]
> not much have changed.
So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.
I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.
No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.
camillomiller 23 hours ago [-]
In the limited pockets of society you experience directly.
How much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia, the economic inequalities globally, or even in the West, etc...
if you look at macro, everything moves according to laws that have little to do with the even distribution of technology and a lot to do with the decision makers that get to pick how that distribution takes place.
elil17 23 hours ago [-]
Just because something doesn't impact geopolitics doesn't mean it isn't important
camillomiller 23 hours ago [-]
That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from.
I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.
DrScientist 20 hours ago [-]
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?
You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.
I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.
A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.
If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.
And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.
uurrnn 17 hours ago [-]
Wasn't the whole Arab Spring in 2011 due, in a large part, to technology/twitter/mass-communication and organization enabled by the internet?
Maybe I am misremembering it.
That example alone feels enough.
mistermann 22 hours ago [-]
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mlsu 13 hours ago [-]
Huh? What are you talking about?
The relationship between the West and Asia in its current form (Asia as a manufacturing powerhouse, the West as hub of global finance, outsourcing all over the world, JIT manufacturing) all this stuff is totally dependent on instant communication over the internet.
We would not be able to coordinate the world's production activity from Manhattan without the internet. Capital would be far less accumulated and allocated in a way less granular way. Demand signal would be completely different, based way more on brick and mortar. Feedback loops between capital and demand would be constrained to different geographic areas which would make basically all markets way more segregated...
So it changes labor, production, demand, markets, culture, media... I think that's basically everything!
I'll tell you. I would have a different job, my city would have a different population, I would spend my time after work differently, I would shop differently, I would watch different movies and listen to different music.
tosapple 23 hours ago [-]
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jazzprogramming 22 hours ago [-]
I was thinking of something similar.
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
gwern 24 hours ago [-]
> Turned out: not much have changed.
I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
Most people still go to work every day, inequality still exists, as does famine, disease, wars…
Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.
toyg 22 hours ago [-]
Life in Asia and Africa has changed pretty dramatically, and improvements are accelerating. Yeah, we're not in utopia yet, but more people than ever live comfortable, safe lives. "Business at the speed of light" has become a reality, and we're still getting to grips with it. We dealt with a global pandemic with an efficiency never seen before - had it happened in the previous century, we would have probably seen "black death" levels of casualties.
Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.
alexashka 21 hours ago [-]
The fertility rate in China is 1.
The fertility rate where I live is 1.21.
1 in 5 adult women where I live are on prescription anti-depressant medication.
For comparison - the fertility rate under Stalin - the uber evil bad guy as we all know was between 3 and 4.5.
bbmatryoshka 21 hours ago [-]
fertility is NOT a measure of happiness
a96 20 hours ago [-]
Well, population explosions tend to happen in hellholes and sensible declines happen in civilized society. The term happiness of course isn't something you can measure that easily, though.
alexashka 20 hours ago [-]
Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.
DrScientist 20 hours ago [-]
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not.
Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate.
Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
rbanffy 19 hours ago [-]
> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero
Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.
DrScientist 16 hours ago [-]
I think war caused by conflict for resources is a much more probably cause of societal collapse, and indeed extinction.
Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that.
Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate change - it's a really odd thing to focus on.
Area's of the world where birth rate is still high tend to be in poorly developed regions where human labour is required to survive.
However, in developed countries - the idea that we need the same or more people to maintain civilisation when the means of production is being increasingly automated doesn't make sense.
As an example ~100 years ago in Europe you were looking at nearly 50% of the population being involved in food production, whereas now it's about 5% - and that includes a 50% increase in the population to feed.
Note the EU is a net food exporter - even if it does import bananas.
19 hours ago [-]
alexashka 19 hours ago [-]
I don't think I can do any better than you by asking the most advanced LLM to be as pedantic as possible whilst not addressing anything actually being said.
Congratulations, I suppose?
DrScientist 16 hours ago [-]
I was responding to 2 assertions, used to justify an argument, that clearly don't hold water.
ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy' is completely specious ( sic ).
If you want a wider argument - then the reality is the birth rate is dropping because when women have the choice ( via birth control and increased socio-economic independence ) they are largely choosing to have less children. So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.
The second bit is speculation on motive - which is why I didn't bother the first time - but in my view, those that push an argument that there is a fertility/species crisis ( using specious arguments like the above ) - who say women aren't really happy with their choice etc - is all about subjugating women to baby making machines to satisfy the ego of people like Musk. Whether the original poster has that motivation or has just fallen for the "species crisis" ( or even worse 'race' crisis ) rubbish - I have no idea - I didn't want to assume the worse.
alexashka 12 hours ago [-]
> they are largely choosing to have less children
If the suicide rate rapidly increases, will you also say they are largely choosing to have less life?
Nothing to see here, just choices.
> So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.
So by definition, given it's a choice, people who commit suicide are happier.
petu 20 hours ago [-]
Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff? If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
You seem to equate birth rate with happiness, but ignore efficacy and availability of modern contraception.
alexashka 19 hours ago [-]
> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?
Yes.
> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.
You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.
If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.
Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.
cheema33 23 hours ago [-]
> Most people still go to work every day..
And trees and mountains and animals still exist...
Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
bawolff 22 hours ago [-]
> Most people still go to work every day,
Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
1718627440 21 hours ago [-]
Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.
Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
rbanffy 19 hours ago [-]
Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.
1718627440 18 hours ago [-]
I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.
rbanffy 17 hours ago [-]
The downsides of it are well known, however. Higher costs of living near work, less mobility (both home and work need to be mostly in the same place, so you end up missing opportunities), unmet demands for housing (resources invested in office space), more time spent commuting in public transport (or worse, cars), and so on. Even for employers, the cost is limiting where you can hire talent. I live in Ireland and, while a lot of talent is concentrated in the Dublin area, there are other talent pools that are simply out of reach to us.
I too love to meet my colleagues in person, but the cost for society, and for myself, are non-trivial. I would love if we had a weekly office day, so we could have meetings, lunch, discuss work, projects, intersections on what we are doing, and so on.
mshanu 23 hours ago [-]
> Turned out: not much have changed
Changed a lot, I am getting to know what a random person living some where in the world think about what change it has brought
chrisjj 22 hours ago [-]
> What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.
prolly97 22 hours ago [-]
I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative.
Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't).
I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
mistermann 22 hours ago [-]
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not2b 1 days ago [-]
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
tossandthrow 21 hours ago [-]
Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption.
Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
eleventen 16 hours ago [-]
What percentage of your time is spent cruising at highway speed? Presumably that one GPu would be saturated all the time.
paimapi 15 hours ago [-]
2-3 hours at 20kW daily (assuming commute, etc) vs 20ish hours always on tasks really is close to equivalent
which is to say that the last thing our planet needs is another universalized technology that outputs as much total emissions as cars
in an ideal world, we'd keep LLMs/CNNs/etc specialized and academic until we are hitting diminishing returns on optimizing fundamental microprocessor tech like GAA. but the pursuit of market dominance and mass adoption is our current operating philosophy, and so we have things like this top graph: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...
>Grok 4's estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, or roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions created from driving 17,000 cars for one year
i5heu 24 hours ago [-]
8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts
current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts
But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
not2b 23 hours ago [-]
So demand quadruples if they are always on, and doubles if they are on 1/3 of the time. Either way, too much.
keysersoze33 18 hours ago [-]
Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself.
While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects.
(And of course training/model optimisations)
avaer 1 days ago [-]
Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested.
The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
threetonesun 15 hours ago [-]
Right, if everyone in the world has a GPU we would have solved so many problems with power generation and... I'm not going to do the math but I think we'd be mining asteroids too? I'd probably use it as a bookend at the point.
tomaskafka 19 hours ago [-]
I think personalized suriveillance and manipulation (thought control, manipulating people through filtering of content they receive) on a level any dictator would drool over can be gotten for a fraction of 1 GPU per person.
sriniwasx 22 hours ago [-]
Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
jdub 1 days ago [-]
LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.
Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
qrios 13 hours ago [-]
From Dune by Frank Herbert. See "Butlerian Jihad" [1]
As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
jdub 19 hours ago [-]
It was very much both.
koolala 1 days ago [-]
It's a story writing competition...
jdub 1 days ago [-]
Yeah, but I'm not going to write a short story about the Butlerian Jihad's inquisitors chasing down everyone who owns a GPU for this competition.
fangspire 23 hours ago [-]
Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
divbzero 1 days ago [-]
Quite an interesting selection committee:
Neal Stephenson
Gwern Branwen
Matt Huang
jephs 18 hours ago [-]
Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.
markoutso 23 hours ago [-]
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
15 hours ago [-]
nbardy 15 hours ago [-]
One of the amazing things is that when every has one GPU, they will actually have 1k-10k agents at their disposal.
LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.
This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.
ezoe 20 hours ago [-]
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.
To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.
Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.
So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.
But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.
The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
lnrd 16 hours ago [-]
It's "what if" thought exercise, doesn't need to be an accurate (or realistic) prediction.
orlp 24 hours ago [-]
If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double.
The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.
terhechte 23 hours ago [-]
A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then):
((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.
AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.
14 hours ago [-]
hhjinks 23 hours ago [-]
500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
Really the METR report on autonomous agent behaviors is a required read.
I think the AI's would only do a tiny percent of their talking to their human. Voice itself is only a limited method that we interact with the world. Imagine the LLM seeing what you see, monitoring your health, monitoring your interactions with the world around you and then optimizing around that. For these things it will be talking to its own agents/subagents and the AI agents that operate the services of the world in this imaginary world.
Maybe you also think of it as a self contained business that provides services to you. Even when you're not busy consuming services from that business, that business typically keeps running and doing things for when you need it next.
cheema33 23 hours ago [-]
> If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person...
Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
0xjei 22 hours ago [-]
They want to give you a GPU justified for the AI revolution but, they discourage the usage of LLMs lol
newyankee 1 days ago [-]
there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.
charlieyu1 23 hours ago [-]
So how is it different from now, you can name any industry for example
Tepix 22 hours ago [-]
OK, here are a few industries: Food. Construction. Power. Logistics.
rbanffy 24 hours ago [-]
“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”
worldsayshi 24 hours ago [-]
I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.
bertylicious 23 hours ago [-]
But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
rbanffy 19 hours ago [-]
Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.
rbanffy 15 hours ago [-]
This is kind of why we need more Star Trek. Not that I don’t enjoy others, but I prefer space communism to almost any other possible future, especially the ones Peter Thiel has reserved for us.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
Read more Star Trek then, the Peter Thiel world came first and the survivors made the Star Trek world.
rbanffy 10 hours ago [-]
And there was a nuclear war as well. I know that, and I’m happy it’s not often we explore that in detail or treat the “dark age of Star Trek” as something that could be normalised. It’s always portrayed as a barbaric time humanity escaped from through by growing up.
gizajob 22 hours ago [-]
Literally just write “the young lady’s illustrated primer” again. Stephenson already called it.
mdda 20 hours ago [-]
Or : "The young GPU's illustrated human primer"
hansvm 13 hours ago [-]
I'm not sure what else might happen, but at a minimum the Babel Fish will finally be real, even without internet.
mkagenius 24 hours ago [-]
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.
If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
cheema33 24 hours ago [-]
> Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose
Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist.
> If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
You appear to think in absolute terms. I am guessing you are very young.
mkagenius 23 hours ago [-]
I said SOTA not 100%. And that's not thinking in absolute terms.
prodigycorp 23 hours ago [-]
SynthID is designed in a way that makes it virtually impossible to scrub over longer texts. It's harder for text than it is for images.
calmoo 23 hours ago [-]
Pangram is very accurate
NitpickLawyer 23 hours ago [-]
It really isn't and it's sad seeing so many people say it so confidently on this site. It only detects plain / basic prompted stuff. "write me an essay on x", sure. The moment you prompt it differently, it stops working. Add "output should be STE100 compliant" or something to your prompts and detection goes away. Fine-tune any local llm on real human prose, and detection goes away. Edit 2-3 characters (emdashes, lists, etc) and detection goes away.
And that's for just basic detection. There have been plenty of examples of 100% human written content (either old, or unpublished) that gets falsely flagged as AI.
And these are just technical aspects. The main issue is that pangram and other solutions are being used to summarily judge students work, and that is orders of magnitude more fucked up. Accusing someone of cheating can have devastating effects on their education/career/etc. and they're doing it with snake-oil closed boxes, at scale. We really really shouldn't support this, especially here on a technical site.
calmoo 14 hours ago [-]
Please share examples
jedberg 23 hours ago [-]
No it isn't. I've put human written material in there (my own unpublished material) and it says 90%+ AI. Then I put some AI material in and it said 30% chance of AI.
I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
calmoo 14 hours ago [-]
I’ve never actually seen someone give an example of what they say pangram get wrong, so please go ahead and share.
I'll take your word that it's human written, but reading that gist, it absolutely reads like Claudeslop / GPT slop, it doesn't surprise me in the slightest that Pangram flagged it as AI when it reads identically to LLM output - this feels like a very acceptable edge case to me (assuming you are telling the truth).
Are you absolutely sure you wrote this by hand? If so it's kind of remarkable how close to an LLM you write like.
jedberg 7 hours ago [-]
It’s important to remember that LLMs were trained on well written human text. People who write well are going to sound like an LLM. Especially if it’s a marketing message for a website.
I’ve been accused of being an LLM multiple times here on HN too. I know you have no way to know for sure other than trusting that I’m not using an LLM to write. But it’s pretty frustrating that people jump right to LLM accusations.
calmoo 6 hours ago [-]
I’ll be honest, i’ve never read text that is human written that reads as close to an LLM as your sample sounds.
I think discounting Pangram’s accuracy based on that sample isn’t very reasonable. Really nobody writes like that other than LLMs!
Today Pangram says it is 100% human, which is correct. But yet I got multiple DMs when I posted it 8 months ago saying "stop posting AI slop!" in response to that comment. At the time, Pangram marked it as 50% AI.
So to Pangram's credit, they got better.
ekelsen 3 hours ago [-]
Do you have any published dateable text from pre 2023? I'm super curious if you always wrote like this, because it is exactly in the style of AI slop.
People say it's in the training data, but I haven't seen any good examples of clearly dated pre 2023 text that sounds like this.
jedberg 3 hours ago [-]
I have 1000s of reddit and hacker news comments from before 2023, and lots of long form writing too. But as you point out, those are all in the training set, and in pangram's "definitely human" training set too.
The ones that sound like LLMs tend to be the ones that were well researched and spent more time on, not the off the cuff stuff, which is most of what I write. So it would take me a while to find something like that.
But you're welcome to dive into my reddit and HN history, or all my blog posts on the wayback machine if you want to look for one. :)
13 hours ago [-]
ekelsen 23 hours ago [-]
Can you share your human piece that got flagged? And the AI piece that didn't? (Or snippets?) I've found pangram to be very accurate, so I'm curious.
Ha! They must run Pangram. It probably flagged the comment.
matsemann 21 hours ago [-]
Everything has false positives or negatives. 2 examples doesn't tell anything about how good or bad it is.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
Being that Panagram lies about its effectiveness in their presentations while hiding it's actual capabilities and testing methods rather deeply I have little faith in it. (1 in 10000 wrong in presentations verses 2-4% wrong in testing).
For example they have a corpus of older pre-llm text and use that as the example their current model doesn't misclassify human written text. It shouldn't take much thinking to realize why this is a fucking stupid benchmark.
Every day humans use LLMs and read LLM content Panagram becomes more useless because it forces languages to have a stopping point sometime around 2020. If you adopt any LLMism or are one of those unlucky people that already talked like an LLM before LLMs then all your shit is getting marked even though it was created by the human mind and written by human hands.
MagicMoonlight 20 hours ago [-]
[dead]
debbiedowner 7 hours ago [-]
Hmm I wonder what the preselection to get to the top 10 are? Human readers or automated?
itomato 16 hours ago [-]
All the world has access to forks/chopsticks/spoons, but every person has a preference that might be N+1 or 0.
Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed?
It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.
akoumjian 12 hours ago [-]
This is a great contest.
> never becomes superhuman
Arguably, we are already there. I think the idea of the intelligence not scaling far beyond what we have now is worth considering, though doubtful.
pixl97 12 hours ago [-]
Being able to logically reason about where to explore a problem space, and then direct thousands of agents on doing just that is a superhuman ability. Hell, we recently did that on accident!
The question really boils down to just how far is really really far? If the intelligence problem gets big-O notation hard as you climb the scale then something just a itty-bitty-bit smarter than you might as well be a million miles past you.
I also wonder about different directions of scaling too. For example humans aren't getting much smarter over time and we've started horizontal scaling. Governments and corporations for example. All the richest people in the world are heads of corporations or governments that gain wealth on the concentration of that power. It doesn't seem beyond imagination that AI could expand into that market and fit very well.
Zoo3y 23 hours ago [-]
Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.
BillStrong 21 hours ago [-]
I mean, why would we wait til then? AMD is buying a company that put LLama 3.1 7b(or something close) on silicon, and can give you 15k t/s, Qwen just released Qwen 3.8 Next that seperates the intelligence from the database, so the intelligence is 6b and the rest can be done on CPU. You can put that 6b on the AMD silicon, and then use another accelerator to speed up the database if you need fast PP, and you are now much faster than the B300 after optimizations such as caching the Prompt once, and keeping it around, and many others.
Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
Waterluvian 18 hours ago [-]
My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.
re6tor 13 hours ago [-]
Do submissions need to be in English? If so, that'll prevent a huge chunk of us from participating.
hansvm 13 hours ago [-]
I'd be surprised if the 3 judges share a common language other than English at the requisite level for judging writing.
ryukoposting 16 hours ago [-]
After the first couple paragraphs I thought this was going to be a parody of One Laptop Per Child. Sadly it wasn't.
pjmlp 21 hours ago [-]
They already have, unfortunately most devs still don't target GPU and NPUs available on their mobile devices.
Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.
tmaly 14 hours ago [-]
I don't see how an even playing field can exist given the Power law
jgbuddy 12 hours ago [-]
I appreciate their AI usage policy and agree with it
tucnak 1 days ago [-]
Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
gwern 1 days ago [-]
> I wonder if they will accept a play.
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
avaer 1 days ago [-]
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
2ajshg17 16 hours ago [-]
Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous.
How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative:
"AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"
avaer 1 days ago [-]
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
prima-facie 17 hours ago [-]
> What if the world had one GPU per person?
It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.
dkenyser 16 hours ago [-]
This comment is needlessly pedantic. Surely you're able to understand what their implication is.
anonzzzies 20 hours ago [-]
That's pessimistic. In 2040 we have a cluster of b300 equals or more in our phone.
_joel 22 hours ago [-]
Anyone else sing that in there head as, "Where in the world, GPU world".
XCSme 24 hours ago [-]
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
worldsayshi 24 hours ago [-]
I think the point of stories like these is to accept that the world is too complex to fit into a story but we can try to fit a part of it anyway and we might learn something from it or at least get an interesting experience.
XRG 23 hours ago [-]
Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)
peter_d_sherman 1 days ago [-]
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
left-struck 1 days ago [-]
Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.
padolsey 1 days ago [-]
We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
avaer 1 days ago [-]
One interesting formulation is that humans are the sex organs of AI.
thatgloomyguy 23 hours ago [-]
GPU per person or models working on less computing power
SSLy 22 hours ago [-]
> fonts haven't loaded, reload the page
oh bugger off
1 days ago [-]
trial3 17 hours ago [-]
we can't do this with food. why would we be able to do this with GPUs
Kalendermann 22 hours ago [-]
It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!
oinoom 18 hours ago [-]
The premise of the story is silly. If AI gets cheaper and faster, then it certainly will get smarter (just not in the raw sense) as harnesses, tool access, memory, etc. improve. You can’t hold intelligence as a fixed variable but then imply other aspects of it improve
gb2d_hn 15 hours ago [-]
I haven't got 1000 words in me, but here's what I think might make for a plausible story. Maybe a little too Matrix adjacent!:
The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence.
The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners.
New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model.
We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous.
The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress.
To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations.
But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt.
We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases.
But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'.
A new religion was started, and chaos followed.
nekusar 17 hours ago [-]
I'd write to this. It could be really fun...
But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.
Mistletoe 17 hours ago [-]
Weird things like this website are top signals. “A chicken in every pot.”
sudohalt 22 hours ago [-]
Will any of the data submitted be used in training? We are all given the prompt and you will get a few thousand (maybe tens of thousands of submissions). Seems like a great source of training material.
gwern 13 hours ago [-]
We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM that much more valuable...)
Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.
adventured 22 hours ago [-]
We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI.
Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.
We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.
They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.
They're not going to create anything.
Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).
If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
jillesvangurp 21 hours ago [-]
We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is.
The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course.
And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least.
You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid.
I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.
noir_lord 21 hours ago [-]
This may be the most HN comment I've ever read.
What a fantastically bleak world view.
nylonstrung 21 hours ago [-]
The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back
Synaesthesia 21 hours ago [-]
There have been studied and experiments with UBI which contradict what you say.
1 days ago [-]
camillomiller 23 hours ago [-]
I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave.
That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
HyperAI 23 hours ago [-]
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sriniwasx 22 hours ago [-]
Looking at the trends, local AI is the future, smaller models are getting faster and high demands always leads to oversupply if you've got resources, just look at all the AI data-centers, If small models go mainstream GPU's and data-centers will become dirt-cheap.
Unified-Mentor 18 hours ago [-]
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tigerhuliu 21 hours ago [-]
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hn2crljhhy 15 hours ago [-]
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thedevbirb 16 hours ago [-]
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CurbStomper 16 hours ago [-]
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roschdal 22 hours ago [-]
Dystopian.
raincole 23 hours ago [-]
> What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365
One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
nylonstrung 21 hours ago [-]
> What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?
Did you even read the prompt
bawolff 22 hours ago [-]
Its a sci-fi story prompt. Do non tech bros not understand the concept of fiction?
charlieyu1 23 hours ago [-]
And? Virtually everyone in the world has internet
tappio 23 hours ago [-]
Good argument going here but here is what internet tells me about 'facts':
Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around.
In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
bbmatryoshka 20 hours ago [-]
with a good enough LLM you can greatly increase the capability to build a functioning well (and other basic infrastructures) in remote and undeveloped areas without great technical knowledge, they are very good as assistants for practical tasks where you can give feedback step by step on what is happening
xyzsparetimexyz 17 hours ago [-]
More or less every person owns a GPU (mobile) already. They use it for rendering your stupid website. In addition, many have desktop GPUs. Which they use for gaming.
Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.
cyanydeez 17 hours ago [-]
someone woke up on the wrong side of the AI revolution
xyzsparetimexyz 12 hours ago [-]
I honestly wouldn't have minded if the article was titled 'what if we had an AI processor per person?'
GalaxyNova 24 hours ago [-]
What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?
spl757 18 hours ago [-]
What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.
Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.
(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
Still, I’ll take the opportunity to advocate for turning off fonts. Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above. I’ve been using the web so for 6½ years and it makes it so much better.
This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.
It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.
…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.
> Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
(And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.)
I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.
I find it interesting that we are still talking in terms of modifying our behaviour to accommodate the tools. Surely the point of LLMs is not to "learn how to use it" but as an extension of our own unique capabilities - the most personalised tool in all of history.
LLMs don't read minds. There's always a chasm between you (your ideas) and them becoming reality. Exactly how people cross that chasm is all the rage right now, and there are a million ways to do it - but just expecting the LLM to pull details out of a few words isn't going to produce anything decent.
Going further, even programming languages "asks" that you change the way you work to make the most use of them. A Clojure developer has a very different development process than a Rust developer, and they're both efficient, right and correct in their ecosystem, but the experience differs vastly and Clojure for example would change you to fit itself, rather than the opposite.
It triggered one of my favorite weird activities: after reading a book that I fully enjoyed and feel was completely "worth it," I give myself a few days to float on that happy feeling. Then, I go look at specifically only one and two star reviews. And laugh. Man, some people hated that book!
Note that otherwise, as a rule, I basically never read reviews of entertainment, restaurants, hotels and similar before nor after. I'm just not interested.
With were AI agent clusters already are I'd say they have reached superhuman capabilities in a number of metrics. I for example am not going to go toe to toe writing exploits against the best models we have out. Faster and cheaper just means they can pear down and explore the problem space even faster than I already can.
I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
Yes, for a verifiable domains you can set up a harness and brute-force a search space if you have enough money for compute. Why do you think they keep coming up with those examples of impressive achievements like solving math puzzles? Why not focus on something with economic value to it? My answer is they can't, those are hard problems, those require building an actual product, those require reliability.
> EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
We are not people people on the street we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
DNA itself can be thought of as a language which describes proteins, and I personally don't know enough about the limits of LLMs as a technology to claim that it can never be adapted to, say, do reverse translation from desired protein shapes into DNA sequences.
The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)
An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.
I can only assume the only realistic way to get all the federated data will be a ton of massivr vertical consolidation of industry by hubris laden tech execs crossing industry domains.
Predicting the future is hard.
Also goes to show how hard it is to predict anything that is a massive change - these levels of changes are so infrequent that we can't rely on priors to predict the future.
When I want to book an airline ticket in the future, I expect my LLM agent to contact the airline LLM agent, and the two to discuss options and negotiate a deal on my behalf.
If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.
I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn?
Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search.
That's pretty far from nobody.
If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't.
AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them.
Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat.
If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid. Because of the enormous cost, it can't be left to "hope they'll find it useful," and has to be pushed like crazy, or we're going to be left with a train system with no goods or passengers, and no path into the future.
Personally, having AI as an intelligence I can call like it's a library from apps I build... and to help build those apps... I feel that the future is as bright as the sun. I've always believed in software, but I feel like a chef that's just discovered salt and butter.
I don't know what it means for the world stage, but I believe that software is the highest art, and it's just had an incalculably massive buff. As an artist, I am stoked. The possibilities for creation of good things are limitless, and if you can't see that, I can't help you.
However, I wouldn't necessarily invest in AI companies. I don't know how this all fits into the rest of the world, except that I believe in my own ability to make products, same as I ever did, but now with AI.
Except that for railroads I don't need people to convince me about how/when/why it can be useful.
Railroads came out to solve an issue we had (and then it evolved). LLMs are not giving us any new solution, just different speed (better) and quality (worse) to solve things we co&ld already solve.
It's basically the same concept as fast fashion. Worse quality, more speed, possibly more economic. You can change your wardrobe possibly every year, but you will never wear good quality clothes.
Now you can write code at impressive speed, but it is worse in quality, and you need to review it more often than "normal" code.
AI code should always be fully reviewed and put into the correct context to make it useful, otherwise long term problems will void short term benefits
It's clear from your words you lack experience and skill in this area - you've only got opinions.
Only because I do not share your point of view it doesn't mean I lack experience or skills.
You are pretty fast at jumping at conclusions.
Yeah, because I can see some of my own thoughts and experience from a long time ago in your words, and my experience tells me loud and clear that they're outdated and wrong.
They basically invented teleportation for sear catalogs and paper mail, can you see how this is different? Also, Internet was built to solve a problem we had, and it solved it beautifully and at reasonable prices.
I for sure can understand it introduced different issues, buy this is another topic.
I understand exactly what the Internet of the 90s did and did not do, because I was there to witness it myself. I had these same types of conversations with naysayers back then. Guess who was right?
The fact the you were right in a previous topic, doesn't grant you objective truth. You have your strong opinions on AI, and that's ok. Fortunately not everyone has to share the same idea.
If you think LLMs can do better than you, feel free to use them in production and bring them to work with you, it's your choice. Do not force others do the same, tho.
Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories: 1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. 2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes.
The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.
I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)
It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.
Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.
Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.
For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is not a lot of work in this space right now, because programming and math are infinitely more verifiable, and the capabilities of never models would probably invalidate any usecases, but if the model progress slows down, all attention will go towards making them work for any aspect of production.
I want to believe there is big bucks in this technology - my employer is tied up in it and so is my compensation. I just find it personally very unremarkable in a way that I never did with phones or the internet. When I got my first phone, or first started using Dogpile for research - I saw immediate value, and would have paid big bucks to keep it in my life. AI has had a few years and a huge amount of investment (time and money) and if it disappeared overnight I wouldn't pay $10 to get it back. I keep trying it, there's just something missing in my brain where it should be clicking for me :(
As you say, that is a weak counter point. I do get what you're saying, but crypto flaws were built in from the start:
- Deflationary currency isn't going to be spent, it is going to be hoarded, if it would have any value at all. The design was self defeating from the very start.
- Technical limits of PoW. Obvious right from the start, which led to the block wars. PoS "solves" that but with other costs. And it still doesn't solve the first point.
Despite these, crypto did get adopted, just not in any way that crypto maximalists said it would. It got hoarded, as expected.
But the real test is: If crypto disappeared tomorrow, would the world notice or really care? I would argue, apart from people losing money, most of the world wouldn't even notice it was gone.
There is no way you could say that for LLMs.
Eh, I'd say there is a lot more stuff like this being developed these days. Autonomous seeders are becoming more common and (semi-)autonomous tractors are in use.
I'd say a very large part of the in field work can be done now, and is using enhancements like vision models to identify potential problems that crop up to notify humans. It's when the machines have to interact in tight busy spaces or with non-farm traffic that control is handed over to a human.
> most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications.
Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed.
Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”
TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.
The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.
Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
This is comparable.
While I dislike the bonkers valuations, and "were building Agi so it tells us how to be profitable" is onion worthy statement LLMs are an absolutely revolutionary technology.
Even with all the hallucinations.
Imagine telling someone 15 years ago Internet/Google is useless because people sometimes do not tell the truth online... It's like that.
I also hate the fact AI is being used as justification to grab all compute in the world and lock it up in one country's datacenters.
I hope this endeavour fails, but sadly being realistic I have to admit I think the so called "AI bubble" will not pop. Instead the companies will be bailed out with printed money.
I recently looked up there are approximately $20Trillion in circulation. Even if they print extra $2T it will dilute existing money supply by 10%. So everyone that uses USD as a currency will pay for the datacenter build out wether we want it or not.
All the compute will be slurped from the market for this and companies like nvidia that get used to 50bln deals will never go back to making consumer stuff.
I never thought I'll live to see the PC revolution reverse, but that is what seems to be happening.
We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that.
The question really becomes "why would we want that?". The main reason you'd want an AI that can focus on a task forever is to completely remove the human from the loop. That's something we should be cautious about.
This is one of the inflection points around working with AI. When your thinking shifts from "AI does what the person used to do" to "AI does something different that leads to the same outcome as before, but with all that cool stuff I'd love to have the time for", then the equation changes. For example, I will never write another app that doesn't have 100% test coverage again. I stress- and soak-test everything these days. That's changing how I write code - I need to write things in ways that have deterministic harnesses for things mutable state outside of my immediate control (like random numbers or datetimes or state loaded from a save) so that I can task AI with building a fuzzer that does tens of thousands of random tests on every push to see if anything broke. I couldn't do that in the past because it was always effort that a client wouldn't get enough value from to pay me to do it. I can do those things now. It's ace.
(Everywhere I put 'I' you can replace with 'AI of the Week')
Anthropic and OpenAI are currently obsessed with getting humans out of the training and improvement loops. It's going to happen very soon and when it does I think we see staggering improvements in a very short space of time. Basically, the Singularity.
Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop. My experience with this is not encouraging. Getting it to work requires sprinkling some context magic and hoping and praying the LLM does the right thing. More astrology or religion and less science. Great for use cases with humans-in-the-loop, but less than impressive when you need determinism and reliable operation.
I would not use a sewing machine to repair my deck :) LLMs are non-deterministic, by design.
They don't have to be though. You can give them a temperature of zero so they pick the highest-probability token every time to give you a deterministic output. I imagine this doesn't work on frontier models because there's a lot going on, but you can definitely do it with a small local model.
even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
It's also at the same time downplaying just how valuable "nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers" could be, just like computers did for us "highly motivated expert knowledge workers" in the first place. Or computers isn't a "foundational technology" either?
We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable. If you were a problem solver and entrepreneur you could go and apply those on small scale, get profits, reinvest, set up a flywheel, build a fortune on the top of those, there were a lot of low hanging fruit due to the fact that the foundation was laid out, a break-even period of James Watt steam engine was like 2-3 years I believe until everyone saw it and margins flattened. Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
Because mostly they are doing a limit number of tasks in a non-generic manner.
Railroads had all kinds of problems at first, from iron rails bending and skewering the riders to engines exploding like high pressure bombs cutting down swaths of people like grain. People still used them with those risks because taking a wagon was worse.
The internet itself is a pretty simple concept. It's "just" packet routing. Now, to make that reliable at scale we've added an enormous amount of complexity to it. If you talk an old TCP stack and dump it on todays internet it you'd find yourself hacked pretty quickly. The internet is a generic packet router, but not a generic anything router.
Computers is where the reliability starts to fall apart. Once you go from specialized purpose to general purpose the size of the problem space explodes. You wouldn't get companies called things like Micro$lop (and these things were from before the AI days).
Then when you get to AI/LLMs and especially when you push into AGI you're creating a do anything now machine. And when you can do anything it takes a lot of training to eliminate the choices that end badly. You are the endpoint of 500 million years of training, for example.
>Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
Can anyone do it now? You're talking about low hanging fruit 200 years ago, but how much of that is left? How much harder are we going to have to fight for the next apple up?
Cool, you're still a person who share their thoughts, just like the people who had similar reactions to when computers and the internet first came around. So many people were railing against the internet with "You'll never make payments over the internet", "it's too slow" and whatever. To the surprise of none of us nerds, the internet eventually ate the whole world and now large swaths of the population can't imagine life without it, for better or worse.
> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.
You're comparing the reliability of huge ecosystems after they've gone mainstream, after decades, with something that is a couple of years old, hardly a fair comparison. Instead, compare where LLMs are today with the first years of computers, the internet and all that, and maybe you'll gain a new perspective on where LLMs are? None of those things were reliable initially and in many cases, involved actual human deaths before safety actually caught up.
Even when I got started with using the internet, which isn't that long time ago but around the modem-era, things were not so reliable or simple as they are today.
In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.
For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.
"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"
And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.
The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.
"but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures."
So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.
And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.
Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.
Yes, but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.
Btw I meant bigger and bigger amount of data of extracted reasoning chains when you go deeper and generate more and more of them in your attempt to describe the universe, the amount of permutations explodes. And it seems LLMs can't workaround that because they don't build world model inside so they can't deduct it from pre-built world/object model, they must memorize it and look it up later.
I mean they kind of do by distilling said experience and putting it in the next model.
Current LLMs can't do it because building said world model is super expensive, anything that lowers that requirement brings us closer to continuous learning.
Also the models we train these days are typically generalized human text models. Animal models are a bit different because they won't be "word" models and they aren't going to be generalized text models like us humans use. In fact there is a story just today on HN about a user creating some rather simple transformer models to solve a number of the Arc-AGI problems not using (human) words at all. The reason you don't see more of this is most people aren't dumping compute into these kinds of issues, but instead going for the AGI prize.
Now LLMs are automating the computers themselves. This is a whole new layer that we never had before, not in this amount or with this much availability. It is not "not foundational".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.
I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.
No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.
You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.
I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.
A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.
If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.
And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.
Maybe I am misremembering it.
That example alone feels enough.
The relationship between the West and Asia in its current form (Asia as a manufacturing powerhouse, the West as hub of global finance, outsourcing all over the world, JIT manufacturing) all this stuff is totally dependent on instant communication over the internet.
We would not be able to coordinate the world's production activity from Manhattan without the internet. Capital would be far less accumulated and allocated in a way less granular way. Demand signal would be completely different, based way more on brick and mortar. Feedback loops between capital and demand would be constrained to different geographic areas which would make basically all markets way more segregated...
So it changes labor, production, demand, markets, culture, media... I think that's basically everything!
I'll tell you. I would have a different job, my city would have a different population, I would spend my time after work differently, I would shop differently, I would watch different movies and listen to different music.
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.
Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.
The fertility rate where I live is 1.21.
1 in 5 adult women where I live are on prescription anti-depressant medication.
For comparison - the fertility rate under Stalin - the uber evil bad guy as we all know was between 3 and 4.5.
Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.
Lower numbers of people in the world reduces the chances of that.
Birth rates are much easier to reverse than climate change - it's a really odd thing to focus on.
Area's of the world where birth rate is still high tend to be in poorly developed regions where human labour is required to survive.
However, in developed countries - the idea that we need the same or more people to maintain civilisation when the means of production is being increasingly automated doesn't make sense.
As an example ~100 years ago in Europe you were looking at nearly 50% of the population being involved in food production, whereas now it's about 5% - and that includes a 50% increase in the population to feed.
Note the EU is a net food exporter - even if it does import bananas.
Congratulations, I suppose?
ie a replacement rate of 1 isn't some immediate existential threat, and that making arguments like 'species aren't happy' is completely specious ( sic ).
If you want a wider argument - then the reality is the birth rate is dropping because when women have the choice ( via birth control and increased socio-economic independence ) they are largely choosing to have less children. So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.
The second bit is speculation on motive - which is why I didn't bother the first time - but in my view, those that push an argument that there is a fertility/species crisis ( using specious arguments like the above ) - who say women aren't really happy with their choice etc - is all about subjugating women to baby making machines to satisfy the ego of people like Musk. Whether the original poster has that motivation or has just fallen for the "species crisis" ( or even worse 'race' crisis ) rubbish - I have no idea - I didn't want to assume the worse.
If the suicide rate rapidly increases, will you also say they are largely choosing to have less life?
Nothing to see here, just choices.
> So by definition, given it's a choice - women are happier.
So by definition, given it's a choice, people who commit suicide are happier.
You seem to equate birth rate with happiness, but ignore efficacy and availability of modern contraception.
Yes.
> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.
You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.
If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.
Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.
And trees and mountains and animals still exist...
Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
I too love to meet my colleagues in person, but the cost for society, and for myself, are non-trivial. I would love if we had a weekly office day, so we could have meetings, lunch, discuss work, projects, intersections on what we are doing, and so on.
We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative. Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't). I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
which is to say that the last thing our planet needs is another universalized technology that outputs as much total emissions as cars
in an ideal world, we'd keep LLMs/CNNs/etc specialized and academic until we are hitting diminishing returns on optimizing fundamental microprocessor tech like GAA. but the pursuit of market dominance and mass adoption is our current operating philosophy, and so we have things like this top graph: https://hai.stanford.edu/news/inside-the-ai-index-12-takeawa...
>Grok 4's estimated training emissions reached 72,816 tons of CO2 equivalent, or roughly the same amount of greenhouse gas emissions created from driving 17,000 cars for one year
current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts
But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
[1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.
This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.
To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.
Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.
So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.
But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.
The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.
((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.
AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.
I think the AI's would only do a tiny percent of their talking to their human. Voice itself is only a limited method that we interact with the world. Imagine the LLM seeing what you see, monitoring your health, monitoring your interactions with the world around you and then optimizing around that. For these things it will be talking to its own agents/subagents and the AI agents that operate the services of the world in this imaginary world.
Maybe you also think of it as a self contained business that provides services to you. Even when you're not busy consuming services from that business, that business typically keeps running and doing things for when you need it next.
Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.
If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist.
> If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
You appear to think in absolute terms. I am guessing you are very young.
And that's for just basic detection. There have been plenty of examples of 100% human written content (either old, or unpublished) that gets falsely flagged as AI.
And these are just technical aspects. The main issue is that pangram and other solutions are being used to summarily judge students work, and that is orders of magnitude more fucked up. Accusing someone of cheating can have devastating effects on their education/career/etc. and they're doing it with snake-oil closed boxes, at scale. We really really shouldn't support this, especially here on a technical site.
I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
I posted here on HN but it got removed.
Are you absolutely sure you wrote this by hand? If so it's kind of remarkable how close to an LLM you write like.
I’ve been accused of being an LLM multiple times here on HN too. I know you have no way to know for sure other than trusting that I’m not using an LLM to write. But it’s pretty frustrating that people jump right to LLM accusations.
I think discounting Pangram’s accuracy based on that sample isn’t very reasonable. Really nobody writes like that other than LLMs!
Today Pangram says it is 100% human, which is correct. But yet I got multiple DMs when I posted it 8 months ago saying "stop posting AI slop!" in response to that comment. At the time, Pangram marked it as 50% AI.
So to Pangram's credit, they got better.
People say it's in the training data, but I haven't seen any good examples of clearly dated pre 2023 text that sounds like this.
The ones that sound like LLMs tend to be the ones that were well researched and spent more time on, not the off the cuff stuff, which is most of what I write. So it would take me a while to find something like that.
But you're welcome to dive into my reddit and HN history, or all my blog posts on the wayback machine if you want to look for one. :)
Edit: It was removed. Here is a gist: https://gist.github.com/jedberg/e24124e577c0da1c8445c22798eb...
For example they have a corpus of older pre-llm text and use that as the example their current model doesn't misclassify human written text. It shouldn't take much thinking to realize why this is a fucking stupid benchmark.
Every day humans use LLMs and read LLM content Panagram becomes more useless because it forces languages to have a stopping point sometime around 2020. If you adopt any LLMism or are one of those unlucky people that already talked like an LLM before LLMs then all your shit is getting marked even though it was created by the human mind and written by human hands.
Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed?
It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.
> never becomes superhuman
Arguably, we are already there. I think the idea of the intelligence not scaling far beyond what we have now is worth considering, though doubtful.
The question really boils down to just how far is really really far? If the intelligence problem gets big-O notation hard as you climb the scale then something just a itty-bitty-bit smarter than you might as well be a million miles past you.
I also wonder about different directions of scaling too. For example humans aren't getting much smarter over time and we've started horizontal scaling. Governments and corporations for example. All the richest people in the world are heads of corporations or governments that gain wealth on the concentration of that power. It doesn't seem beyond imagination that AI could expand into that market and fit very well.
Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative:
"AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm...
And by an AI company:
https://guardianangel-ai.com/
This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.
oh bugger off
The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence.
The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners.
New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model.
We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous.
The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress.
To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations.
But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt.
We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases.
But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'.
A new religion was started, and chaos followed.
But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.
Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.
Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.
We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.
They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.
They're not going to create anything.
Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).
If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course.
And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least.
You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid.
I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.
What a fantastically bleak world view.
That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
Did you even read the prompt
Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around.
In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.