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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

#111

Post by jostylr »

css_apologist wrote: post #94
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…

these things you are talking about are only true due to the unbelievably LARGE marketing ~propaganda~ spending what you're saying reflects corporation tendencies take away the propaganda, let people live, see how they react

How would you distinguish corporation influencing consumers from corporations following consumers? One thing would be to see if there are items that are heavily advertised by corporations but that they do not succeed. You can also take items that everyone knows about, no one wants, and then launch a propaganda campaign and see what happens. Different propaganda works in different ways so one would need to try varieties. I imagine a randomly controlled trial of having various ubiquitous goods that are not heavily advertised nor heavily purchased and then randomly assigning different advertising strategies (including none). Do that in various regions, countries, ethnicities, etc, and then see what can be seen.

My guess is that advertising raises desire by a few percent in most cases. There would be some instances of a run away craze, probably with a massive rise followed by a collapse, but that most products would largely be unaffected. I assume some advertising strategies would backfire and reduce demand.

For me, I feel like most of the time it is been exposed to the existence of an item and my ability to see how it could be useful. I don't think random advertisements I come across impact me that much since most of the advertisements I see don't seem to correspond to anything I want or do or spend money on.

Humans use their imagination to figure out what choice of action leads to a future of less uncomfortability. Often times, these are choices between short term future and long term future. Advertising is a way of helping shape that argument as to what choice is to be taken, but the underlying drive is already there.

You could also look for cases where propaganda is used against consumerism and see how impactful that tends to be.

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

#112

Post by simonra »

everdrive wrote: post #96
css_apologist wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

these things you are talking about are only true due to the unbelievably LARGE marketing ~propaganda~ spending what you're saying reflects corporation tendencies take away the propaganda, let people live, see how they react

I'm not convinced. Propaganda only works when it relies on something that people are dispositionally inclined towards. eg: hating foreigners, calls towards group unity, etc. You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.

> You can't use propaganda to trick people into becoming experts at calculus, for instance.

Perhaps not an individual instantly. But how about settling for making a generation of parents fear that there will be no future for their kids unless they get fantastic grades, and that they have to use them to go into stem?

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

#113

Post by hadlock »

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 suspect due to model distillation, their need to stay on top for IPO value is more important than absolutely crushing their competition, who will simply harvest their output and distill it for training data on a ~3 month delay. Also they are probably hitting a wall on increase in intelligence vs training time.

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

#114

Post by infecto »

cush wrote: post #110
infecto wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do we know inference is heavily subsidized? Are all these third party Chinese model providers subsidizing the true cost?

> How do we know inference is heavily subsidized? Balance sheets > Are all these third party Chinese model providers subsidizing the true cost? It could be argued the subidies are even heavier than American model providers as the price war among Chinese providers is so fierce. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3358868/after-tri...

You did not answer the question at all.

Third party inference providers for Chinese models are in the US and there are so many players it would be shocking they are all heavily subsidizing it.

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

#115

Post by wpm »

wongarsu wrote: post #72
vanuatu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)

I can still feel performance increases, most recently was when I got an M4 Mac Mini. Compared to my M2 Air, which is no slouch by any means, there was a very perceptible improvement in latency, app opening, general task completion, and so on. But very slight, and some coming from placebo effect/marketing.

These days, I feel the most performance uplift when I switch from Windows/macOS over to a Linux or BSD installation, if only because there is so little wasted effort in running a bajillion little background tasks for crap I didn't ask for. Windows 10 on my PC is highly debloated and optimized, very little in my startup services and so on, but CachyOS on the same hardware feels leagues better.

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

#116

Post by everdrive »

ButlerianJihad wrote: post #106
everdrive wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What would you do if all your food sources were appallingly lacking in essential nutrients and the sorts of things your body craved in order to get fed? When I hit 300 lbs I might suspect there was a flaw in my reasoning.

Sure, you may be a rational actor and come to your senses, but you are also poor, you have no vehicle, and you live in a food desert. So will you realistically be up for major modifications to your lifestyle and habits?

I hear what you're saying -- I think there are a few points here:

- Obesity is not isolated to food deserts. The people in food deserts may be in a pitiable situation, but most of us are obese; not just the people in food deserts. If obesity were isolated to food deserts, or even concentrated in food deserts, I might feel differently.

- Even the people in food deserts have access to nutrition labels. One thing that makes a lot of sense is ensuring you get your vitamins, and then keeping the rest of your food cheap. In other words, the most cost-effective food regarding calorie-per-dollar might be zebra cakes, but obviously you don't actually to just buy Zebra cakes. Living on black beans and rice might not sound appealing, but it is not the path to obesity. When you live on black beans and rice, other foods are your garnish. Sparing, small servings, but present from time to time. Most breakfast cereal is also effectively just grass seed + vitamin powder, as well.

[edit]

There was a time in my life where I had very little money, and I lived on black beans and rice for quite a while. I biked and walked around the city and I was thinner than I've ever been since.

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

#117

Post by alphakappa »

behringer wrote: post #88
wongarsu wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)

Your computer may not feel faster than a 20 year old PC, but CPUs have gotten way, way faster. Compare the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to the AMD A12-9800, you go from 4 cores to 8, and you double the power consumption. But it's not twice as fast. It's 10 times faster. Depending on the exact metric, it could be as little as twice as fast or as much as 1000 times faster, depending on the exact operations. On top of that memor…

That is OP's point. The underlying technology has gotten faster but the computer you use feels the same as 20 years ago because the software that utilizes it does a lot more too.

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

#118

Post by cush »

infecto wrote: post #114
cush wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do we know inference is heavily subsidized? Balance sheets > Are all these third party Chinese model providers subsidizing the true cost? It could be argued the subidies are even heavier than American model providers as the price war among Chinese providers is so fierce. https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3358868/after-tri...

You did not answer the question at all. Third party inference providers for Chinese models are in the US and there are so many players it would be shocking they are all heavily subsidizing it.

It would be shocking to you if in a market with many competing sellers would there be price competition such that those sellers are operating at a loss?

If you’re trying to get me to argue that every seller is operating at a loss, I don’t know. But overall the market absolutely is, again because balance sheets

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

#119

Post by andriy_koval »

wongarsu wrote: post #76
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…

Sensors are a huge challenge for robotics. We have very precise force-feedback on our joints, pressure and heat (temperature gradient) sensors all over our body, and our hands have a sensor density that allows us to count needle heads and detect the exact grip strength needed by feeling the micro-slippage of objects in our hands. Robots don't have that. You can do backflips with pretty much just visual sensors for yo…

> We have very precise force-feedback on our joints, pressure and heat (temperature gradient) sensors all over our body

You can do all the same with robots. Current advantage of human that on top of imperfect sensor data we have hyper-efficient brain connecting all dots and making calculations and approximations, and this gap looks very closeable today.

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

#120

Post by andriy_koval »

infecto wrote: post #79
Alien1Being wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

~1min per shirt in a controlled environment. Better but still far away.

Also, 24h 365d, which is superior to humans.
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