Thoughts on slowing the fuck down

A service goes down. He tells the agent to debug it and fix it. The agent pulls some logs from $CLOUDPROVIDER, inspects the logs, produces a fix and then automatically updates a shared document with the postmortem.

This got me thinking that it's very hard to internalize both issue and solution -updating your model of the system involved- because there is not enough friction for you to spend time dealing with the problem (coming up with hypotheses, modifying the code, writing the doc). I thought about my very human limitation of having to write things down in paper so that I can better recall them.

Then I recalled something I read years ago: "Cars have brakes so they can go fast."

Even assuming it is now feasible to produce thousands of lines of quality code, there is a limitation on how much a human can absorb and internalize about the changes introduced to a system. This is why we will need brakes -- so we can go faster.

Yes but the chips, hardware, copper cables, silicon and all the rest of the components that make up a server are finite. Unless these magically appear from outer space, we'll face the same resource constraints as everything else that is pulled out of the ground.

These components are also far more fragile to source, see COVID and the collapse of global supply chains. Also the factories to create these components are expensive to build and fragile to maintain. See the Dutch company that seems to be the sole supply of certain manufacturing skills.[1]

> I would bet a lot of money that the price of LLM assistance will go down, not up, as the hardware and software advance.

My bet would be that it would fuel the profits of AI companies and not make the price of AI come down. Over supply makes price come down but if supply is kept artificially low, then prices stay high.

That's the comparison to OPEC and oil. There is plenty of oil to go around yet the supply is capped and thereby prices kept high. There is no guarantee that savings in hardware or supply will be passed on by AI corps.

Indeed there is no guarantee that there will be serious competition in the market, OPEC is a monopoly so why not have an AI monopoly? At the moment, all major players in AI are based in the same geopolitical sphere, making a monopoly more likely, IMHO.

In the end, it's all speculation what will happen. It just depends on which fairy tail one believes in.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASML_Holding

No worries there, the huge improvements we see today from GPT and Claude, are at their heart just Reinforcement Learning (CoT, chain of thought and thinking tokens are just one example of many). RL is the cheapest kind of training one can perform, as far as I understand. Please correct me if that's not the case.

In the economy the invisible hand manages to produce everything cheaper and better all the time, but in the digital space the open source invisible hand makes everything completely free.

Only the very dumbest think “doom” is some apocalyptic scene from a Hollywood film in which humans are nearly wiped out.

“Doom” is instead when swaths of Roman citizens with rights amidst a powerful, civically and technologically impressive hegemony, over time find themselves reduced to unfree serfs. They and their descendants would remain in that position for centuries until a horrific disease came through and killed so many of them that the serfdom became untenable.