Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

catalystneuro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 151 posts

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

#51

Post by tgv »

brotchie wrote: post #4

There’s still 50-500x cost reduction in “this is only an engineering problem” low hanging fruit from specialized chips to run the models + improved distillation. Entirely feasible that by 2031, Fable 5 (or greater) intelligence level models will run cool on smart phones, if not sooner.

You're betting on getting getting ridiculously powerful chips to run on batteries in a tiny housing without cooling, while we can't even get enough RAM? It would be a terrible waste of resources. Now we already have TFLOPs wasting in our pockets and backpacks, then we'll have PFLOPs idling, because there's so much time between prompts. Much more efficient to batch it on a server.

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

#52

Post by kaashif »

Alien1Being wrote: post #17
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…

Xiaomi robots do this in double digit seconds. Still slow compared to humans, but Chinese robots will be as successful as Chinese EVs, phones and solar panels.

Which is to say, they'll be banned in the US.

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

#53

Post by sweetjuly »

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

I don't think it's a matter of "staying ahead"; the proprietary frontier models are better, but the trouble for them is that open weight models are good enough in increasingly many cases. This raises the floor on the frontier companies and cuts their total addressable market by commodifying the easier LLM tasks. This is really the central argument of tfa :)

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

#54

Post by vanuatu »

everdrive wrote: post #49
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. Th…

You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.

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

#55

Post by jayd16 »

everdrive wrote: post #49
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. Th…

Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?

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

#56

Post by kaashif »

tgv wrote: post #51
brotchie wrote: post #4

There’s still 50-500x cost reduction in “this is only an engineering problem” low hanging fruit from specialized chips to run the models + improved distillation. Entirely feasible that by 2031, Fable 5 (or greater) intelligence level models will run cool on smart phones, if not sooner.

You're betting on getting getting ridiculously powerful chips to run on batteries in a tiny housing without cooling, while we can't even get enough RAM? It would be a terrible waste of resources. Now we already have TFLOPs wasting in our pockets and backpacks, then we'll have PFLOPs idling, because there's so much time between prompts. Much more efficient to batch it on a server.

At some point we'll have enough RAM, surely. The incentives to produce more are huge and all the fabs are booked out.

Maybe it'll take 10 years or 20 years. Not much of a comment on the phone stuff but I'd caution against suggesting technology will never be good enough to do X. Maybe it'll be horrendously wasteful but it might happen.

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

#57

Post by LoganDark »

vanuatu wrote: post #54
everdrive wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Th…

You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.

many computers actually feel much slower than they did 20 years ago: https://danluu.com/input-lag/

(...or over 40 years ago)

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

#58

Post by vanuatu »

I think what a lot of people miss about jevon's paradox is the elasticity of demand of the underlying resource

textiles had jevons paradox, and many more textile workers were employed even when textile machines were being created, until we saturated the demand for cheap clothing in the world and then textile workers were kaput (same for farming, and horses)

software is currently undergoing jevons paradox, but it's very unknown how high the ceiling of demand for software is. web dev might be doomed, but software in general i think is probably limitless

Intelligence is also probably unbounded (atm software and intelligence are very closely tied together). its very possible token spend rides up the curve forever.

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

#59

Post by everdrive »

jayd16 wrote: post #55
everdrive wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Th…

Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?

I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep...

Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.

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

#60

Post by bena »

perching_aix wrote: post #27
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…

Sounds like a variation on the induced demand principle: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Induced_demand Related: - Parkinson's law: "Work expands to fill the available time." https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Parkinson%27s_Law - Lewis–Mogridge position: "Traffic expands to meet the available road space." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lewis%E2%80%93Mogridge_positio... And I pretty much just plain agree, this is…

Also Jevon's Paradox: the more efficient a system becomes, the more it gets used, making it use more resources rather than less.
Post reply on HN