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Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

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Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#231

Post by pona-a »

sixhobbits wrote: post #196
spprashant wrote: post #174

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?

There's a video by Siliconversations [0] about it. Medicine is first and foremost limited by high-quality data, not intelligence. If OpenAI built a superhuman AGI tomorrow, it would not change a thing about the state of cancer treatment, at least not for a while.

Trying to design a cancer cure by setting a trillion alight on AI is like trying to achieve UBI by funneling citizen's taxes into Polymarket, so they may operate their free supermarket.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ijTxAfFUHkY

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#232

Post by nradov »

grandchild wrote: post #204
brookst wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t see it. Both professionally and personally I’m producing so much more now. Back burner projects that weren’t worth months of my time are easily worth a few hours and $20 or whatever. Why would I pull back?

You're forgetting that the 20$ are not a sustainable price point. Would your backburner personal app thingy be worth 200$?

Compute capacity for the same workload always gets cheaper over time.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#233

Post by spprashant »

sixhobbits wrote: post #196
spprashant wrote: post #174

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

Personalized medical treatment looks like the most promising candidate so far, would that do it for you?

Yes. But unfortunately that domain suffers from ambiguity which LLMs are bad at.

Medical treatment has never been about asking questions and getting perfect answers. Excellent doctors and nurse practitioners have a great intuition for which questions to ask based on cues during patient assessment.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#234

Post by whiplash451 »

spprashant wrote: post #174

I think all misgivings about AI would go away fast, if it solved one important problem for humanity. Carbon nanotubes for space elevators, sustainable nuclear fusion, or something in that ilk.

You could take the same issue with all productivity changes that came before AI (typewriters, laptops, etc)

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#235

Post by jclulow »

nradov wrote: post #232
grandchild wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're forgetting that the 20$ are not a sustainable price point. Would your backburner personal app thingy be worth 200$?

Compute capacity for the same workload always gets cheaper over time.

No piece of compute capacity (in the form of equipment) I have bought this year has been in any way cheaper than last year.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#236

Post by jeremyjh »

jiggawatts wrote: post #125
Lerc wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The shovels and labour used to make those things where not depreciated. The GPUs are the shovels, not the project. AI at any capability will retain that capbibilty forever. It only gets reduced in value by superior developments. Which are built upon technologies that the previous generation developed.

> retain that capbibilty forever Not really. The base training data cutoff will quickly render models useless as they fail to keep up with developments. Translating some Farsi news articles about the war was hilarious, Gemini Pro got into a panic. ChatGPT either accused me of spreading fake news, or assumed this was some sort of fantasy scenario.

Karpathy - and others - consider the pre-training knowledge as much a liability as an asset. If we could just retain the emergent reasoning and language capability without the hazy recollections the models would likely be stronger.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#237

Post by theptip »

delusional wrote: post #149
gravypod wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The side effects of spending funds on these mega projects is also something to consider. NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies .

> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).

If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet.

Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get.

We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically different.

Again, all of this is obvious if you spend 1k hours with the current crop, this isn’t making any capability gain forecasts.

Just for a dumb example, there is a great ChatGPT agent for Instacart, you can share a photo of your handwritten shopping list and it will add everything to your cart. Just following through the obvious product conclusions of this capability for every grocery vendor’s app, integrating with your fridge, learning your personal preferences for brands, recipe recommendation systems, logistics integrations with your forecasted/scheduled demand, etc is I contend going to be equivalent engineering effort and impact to the move from brick and mortar to online stores.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#238

Post by theptip »

grandchild wrote: post #204
brookst wrote: post #198

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I just don’t see it. Both professionally and personally I’m producing so much more now. Back burner projects that weren’t worth months of my time are easily worth a few hours and $20 or whatever. Why would I pull back?

You're forgetting that the 20$ are not a sustainable price point. Would your backburner personal app thingy be worth 200$?

This is thoroughly debunked at this point. The frontier labs are profitable on the tokens they serve. They are negative when you bake in the training costs for the next generation.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#239

Post by delusional »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #162
delusional wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).

AI progress may fizzle out, but everything it produced so far would still be there . Models are just big bags of floats - once trained, they're around forever (well, at least until someone deletes them), same is true about harnesses they run in (it's just programs). But AI proliferation is not stopping soon, because we've not picked up even the low hanging fruits just yet. Again, even if no new SOTA models were to be…

> there's years if not decades of R&D work into how to best use the ones we have - how to harness the big ones, where to embed the small ones, and of course, more fundamental exploration of the latent spaces and how they formed, to inform information sciences, cognitive sciences, and perhaps even philosophy.

I think my sense of "dead end" would entail none of those directions panning out into anything interesting. You would "explore the latent spaces" only to find nothing of value. Embedding the LLM models wouldn't end up doing anything useful for whatever reason, and philosophy would continue on without any change.

Re: Hyperscalers have already outspent most famous US megaprojects

#240

Post by delusional »

theptip wrote: post #237
delusional wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> NASA spending has created a huge pile of technologies that we use day to day We're a little too early to know if that's the case here too. I do foresee a chance at a reality where AI is a dead end, but after it we have a ton of cheap GPU compute lying about, which we all rush to somehow convert into useful compute (by emulating CPU's or translating traditional algorithms into GPU oriented ones or whatever).

If all AI progress somehow immediately halted, the models that have currently been built will still have more economic impact than the Internet. Not least because the slower the frontier advances, the cheaper ASICs get on a relative basis, and therefore the cheaper tokens at the frontier get. We have a massive scaffolding capability overhang, give it ten years to diffuse and most industries will be radically differen…

You have to agree that it's totally possible that none of those things you are envisioning getting built out actually end up working as products, right?

AI (LLM) progress would stop, and then everything people try to do with those last and most capable models would end up uninteresting or at least temporary. That's the world I'm calling a "dead end".

No matter how unlikely you think that is, you have to agree that it's at least possible, right?

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