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AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

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Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#31

> What happened the last time that everything changed? * Hardware era (pre 1995s) -> IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Apple * Internet era (1994-2001) -> Amazon, Google, Meta, Salesforce * Mobile era (iPhone+ era) -> Uber, Mobile Games, Youtube, Snapchat, Tiktok, Airbnb * Cloud era (AWS+ era) -> AWS, GCP, Azure, Snowflake, Databricks and bunch of other data & database startups AI era (ChatGPT+ era) -> Change is inevitable

? That appears to be arbitrary eras then arbitrary companies from that era. Do you think Amazon and Google disappeared after 2001? Do you think databricks is now bigger than IBM?

Change might be inevitable, but I'm not sure your list shows or proves that.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#32
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that DeepSeek may be important to that. They have a really good model that's open source, raising the bar for all other players: how good your model needs to be so you can make meaningful money on it (better than DeepSeek). Same thing happened on other places the open source offering became popular.

What good is an open-weights DeepSeek model if you have nowhere to run it? OpenAI / Google / Anthropic / XAI also have a ton of compute. That is the real moat.

That seems pretty temporary if people can just build more compute.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#33
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that DeepSeek may be important to that. They have a really good model that's open source, raising the bar for all other players: how good your model needs to be so you can make meaningful money on it (better than DeepSeek). Same thing happened on other places the open source offering became popular.

What good is an open-weights DeepSeek model if you have nowhere to run it? OpenAI / Google / Anthropic / XAI also have a ton of compute. That is the real moat.

antirez running (quantized) DeepSeek V4 Pro on a Mac Studio M3 Ultra with 512GB of RAM:

https://bsky.app/profile/antirez.bsky.social/post/3mlzwmvlov...

It's much closer than you think. We're going to see specialized hardware in the next 24 months capable of running 2025-era frontier models. That's big.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#35
post #3

Didn't Ben Evans previously shill for bitcoin, which is now omitted in the graphs for "disruptive technologies"? This is a marketing Gish Gallop talk that pretends to invalidate counterarguments with a couple of fantasy graphs.

[flagged]

Hah wow, what a way to confirm what he posted.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#36
post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that DeepSeek may be important to that. They have a really good model that's open source, raising the bar for all other players: how good your model needs to be so you can make meaningful money on it (better than DeepSeek). Same thing happened on other places the open source offering became popular.

What good is an open-weights DeepSeek model if you have nowhere to run it? OpenAI / Google / Anthropic / XAI also have a ton of compute. That is the real moat.

I just got into self hosting Deepseek v4 Flash on a single DGX Spark via antirez’s DwarfStar 4 project

It feels great to finally have access to something local.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#37
This is a reasonably well-examined take of the situation.

On the technical side, one of the additional things I've had on my mind is the potential that these mega models are in fact hiding a ton of inefficiency.

The approach of simply shoving higher dimensionality and more parameters into largely tweaks to the current models has delivered results, but it feels like "mainframe" era of computing to me.

Throwing reams of annotated human content and forcing the machine to globally draw associations from it feels clumsy. Just as people are able to learn structured knowledge via rule-systems that are successively elaborated with extensions and situational contradictions, I feel like there's probably a much more compact representational model that can be reached by adapting the current technical foundations (transformers, attention, etc.) to work well with generated examples from rule-systems, that then gets used as a base layer to augment the "high level" models that process unstructured data.

The risk for the behemoth datacenter might be similar to the risk in the early computing era of building compute centers right before the PC revolution took off.

If it turns out that there exists some more compact and efficient representation for this intelligence (which IMHO is likely given that we are still in the first generation of this technology), the datacenters may end up decaying mausoleums of old tech that has no relevance to a distributed intelligence future.

That's the big technical unknown unknown for me. How much efficiency juice is there left to squeeze, and what does that mean for a distributed landscape vs a centralized datacenter based landscape.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#39
post #3

Didn't Ben Evans previously shill for bitcoin, which is now omitted in the graphs for "disruptive technologies"? This is a marketing Gish Gallop talk that pretends to invalidate counterarguments with a couple of fantasy graphs.

[flagged]

It is an indisputable fact that you spent years shilling crypto. Why even deny that or threaten(!) someone pointing it out? It was/is a huge, verifiable chunk of your public output.

Re: AI eats the world (Spring 26) [pdf]

#40
tl;dr;

> "What happened the last time that everything changed?"

Honestly, I'm glad we hear more of the commoditization of AI, and I hope that the comparison of AI with water or electricity will become mainstream and that the states (as in nation states) will understand that sooner rather than later and act accordingly.

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