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What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

catalystneuro.com

131–140 of 151 posts

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

#131
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.

If fable 5 could eventually run on a smartphone, I wonder what we'll get out of datacenters. Musk and others are trying to build 100gw of compute by 2030. Will we get something 1-10 million times better than Fable 5, or will the parity gap between local and datacenter capability pair down enormously?

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

#132
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 presume you're a Windows user then.

When the M1 was released, I couldn't believe how fast it was.

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

#133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 m…

People are often not aware of how their ability to function far exceeds some other people who are not so fortunate.

To describe a lifestyle of "surviving on black beans and rice" and riding your bike around, implies that you maintained a functioning household and kitchen with paid, active utilities; you were able to clean the room, vessels, appliances and utensils on a regular basis; you did pest control as necessary, and you were able to accomplish basic cooking tasks 2-3 times a day, every day.

Accomplishing all these tasks well enough to survive, feed yourself without hazard, and not become overrun with cockroaches is a sure sign of baseline mental capacity and cognitive function. Again, there are lots of poor people who were homeless, or grew up in dysfunctional households, or are on the brink of homelessness, and struggle with mental illness that militates against them "surviving on black beans and rice" day by day.

So I congratulate anyone who can accomplish these seemingly-trivial tasks. You deserve a pat on the back for sure!

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

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of ove…

Is that because non lighting electricity use increased though? 30% increase in the percentage of a growing pie isnt the same as a straight 30% increase

No, per capita electricity usage dropped slightly over the last 25 years, driven in part by LED adoption.

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

#136
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…

Given the 750 tok/sec GPT 5.6 Sol Ultrafast (via Cerebras), the many-1000 tok/sec Chinese models, and the 15000 tok/sec Taalas HC1, I think we're well on the way towards seeing that solved too. Combine the two, and yeah, wild ride incoming. What's especially bewildering to me is that translated back to raw bandwidth, even 15000 tok/sec is just like what, 75 KB/s? Extremely meager amounts of data, moving mountains. It…

Haha. Yeah. I somehow find Claude Code’s utter lack of time reasoning to be very fun. “The work we did two weeks ago…” oh friend that was this morning…

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

#137

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)

You had SSDs in 2006? Was I missing out? I don't think I had any in my builds until 2014ish

ohhhhh yeah they had those sata ssds out a few years before the nvme thing came out, I almost forgot about those! but in 2006 yeah that woulda not been cheap, like year zero early adopter type stuff too, pay 1200 for 32 gigs and its dead in 2 years maybe 5 years tops. I got my first one of those quite a few years later once 256gb was comparable in price to 1tb harddisk drive.

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

#138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And? Still in a controlled environment. I cannot pick one up today from a store.

laundry folding is some superficial benchmark, real impact will be made in controlled environments in factories, packing centers, etc.

And? Please scroll the start of this thread. Robotics is a long way off, we need better models and more compute. I am not sure what you are arguing for.

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

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

laundry folding is some superficial benchmark, real impact will be made in controlled environments in factories, packing centers, etc.

And? Please scroll the start of this thread. Robotics is a long way off, we need better models and more compute. I am not sure what you are arguing for.

My point is that robotics is not long way off, but already has strong utility and gradually taking over more and more functions.

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

#140
post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Balance sheets is not an answer. Sorry I am just asking for material proof. It would indeed be pretty shocking for every market participant, large or small, funded or unfunded to be operating inference at a loss. Plans are definitely subsidized. Inference (token consumption) has never been proven to be operating at a loss and now that you can run many of the large SOTA models from China on sparks or other clustered s…

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