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What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

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Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#41

Post by HappyPanacea »

jostmey wrote: post #26
nchmy wrote: post #23

I've been working with the chinese open models for 4 months. They are more than capable for a tiny fraction of the cost of the frontier ones. And yet they also continue to get significantly better and (Deepseek's recent price increase aside) cheaper. Its hard to fathom how the truly frontier stuff will be able to compete long-term.

And why won’t the frontier models continue to become better? The open models are getting better but so are the frontier models. The frontier models might remain in a constant race to remain ahead

Diminishing returns on both intelligence and training, mostly

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#42

Post by AnotherGoodName »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #14
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #3

I think a big one is robotics. A robot can today fold your laundry. It takes ~10mins per item. Seriously. It takes a long time to process the image find the corner move the claw to the corner of the shirt and attempt to straighten before folding. Robots right now generally move at glacial speeds. You might have seen robots doing flips in semi controlled environments but watch how slowly they open doors etc. processin…

Have LLMs improved at being able to process physics-based problems and environments? I remember that issue being discussed around generative gaming a while ago but I hadn't heard much about it recently.

Transformers in general are huge but if you say LLM you’re specifically saying the language model transformer. Robots use vision transformers

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#44

Post by bee_rider »

Balooga wrote: post #21

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…

Definitely not going to argue against the Jevons paradox in general, it is observed in various cases.

The lightbulb thing seems different though? Or at least it is a specific subset. Lights in Las Vegas are sort of an advertisement, right? In the sense that having the brightest or most interesting (or whatever) lights draw attention to your show, casino, hotel, whatever. It’s kind of a zero sum game in that the different shops are competing for the finite attention of a more-or-less set number of tourist. I think part of the Jevons paradox is that society generally finds more useful applications of the newly cheap thing. If the thing’s only purpose is to compete better in a competition with a set prize (all of the tourists’ money), that’s constrained in some way.

Intelligence is weird though. I guess we could eventually hit the point where, I dunno, maybe there’s some information theoretic bound where we process all of our signals as cleverly as possible and aren’t bound by intelligence anymore. Obviously we’re nowhere near that. It would be a very alien environment.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#45

Post by jbstack »

jbotdev wrote: post #36

I think speed is actually going to be a bigger factor than cost. Even projects where “money is no object” often hit a wall with LLM response times. Sure you can speed things up with parallel work under subagents, but as with parallelizing traditional computational tasks, there are diminishing gains. I keep hearing people saying just change the way you work to trust long-running agents and multi-task more, because the…

> they’re too slow to work with interactively for many use cases

This just demonstrates how much we already take for granted the LLMs that we have now. If you compare it to what we had before (hand the task off to a junior dev and wait for them to complete the work) then it doesn't seem slow at all.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#46

Post by rjsw »

andai wrote: post #22

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me". I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

Douglas Adams captured this in "Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency", a VCR watches TV for you and an Electric Monk believes things for you to save you the effort of doing it yourself.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#47

Post by perching_aix »

dboreham wrote: post #38
bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #15

Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds. That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for…

I think this viewpoint fails to understand what "intelligence" is. The idea must be that intelligence is some special thing that only humans have. So when machines couldn't do jack s... we said "it's the Turing test". When machines blew through the Turing test we said "that was just prediction..not really intelligence, that's different". It's not different. The delusion humans have is that intelligence is special and…

I notice that a lot of these terms are squarely humanist for certain people, so any kind of allegation that machines are exhibiting them as traits will be a complete showstopper for them. You'll either be strung along on an infinite goalpost moving exercise, or be accused of either anthropomorphization [0] in the kinder cases, or straight up mental illness in the less so kind cases. Never will they stop to consider that maybe you're simply working with a post-humanist understanding of these words, as that basically doesn't make sense to them, and as they are usually quite vested for it to stay that way.

I remember in one of the Hugging Face incident threads here, simply acknowledging that the agents were operating autonomously was super controversial. Thousands of years old concept [1], still inherently human for a lot of people.

To be clear, I'm not trying to be judgemental with this, I more consider it to be a communications breakdown, and find that to be frustrating instead. I'm not really sure how to meaningfully help it either, cause no matter how one slices it, you will in the end ask these people do desecrate these terminologies in favor of some more twisted-seeming ones. Same the other way around, the humanist understanding of these terms is basically non-workable.

[0] as opposed to personification, which is what people are actually doing almost always: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personification

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

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#48

Post by Frieren »

Balooga wrote: post #21

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…

> I think the same will happen with tokens. As the cost of tokens comes down, these models will just consume more tokens.

That sounds a race to the bottom for AI companies profits.

I do not think that LEDs are high profit margin items.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#49

Post by everdrive »

Balooga wrote: post #21

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…

> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays.

People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health.

Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. They're merely more capable -- developers quickly and aggressively fill up (and overflow) all that added capability until you're back in the same place you used to be.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#50

Post by Flamkuchlo »

Balooga wrote: post #21

Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…

Tokens for sure because we still waiting for agents talking to agents as a default. Like your agent team and very long or 24/7 running agents.

But we never scaled intelligence like this. The industrieal revolution created for the people at that time quite a huge issue / it was disruptive.

What will hapen to us though?

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