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GPU World

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Re: GPU World

#141

Post by lacedeconstruct »

holoduke wrote: post #135
maxnevermind wrote: post #77

> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build u…

Absolutely untrue. LLM will be the automation force of everything. It will connect and orchestrate our entire society. It will be a much bigger impact that any other revolution in the past. Our lives will be unrecognizable in 10 years from now.

In 10 years from now we will have another AI winter until a new thing arrives that pushes further.

Re: GPU World

#142

Post by lukan »

maxnevermind wrote: post #77

> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build u…

"If we talk about just LLMs"

In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.

For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.

"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"

And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.

The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.

"but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures."

So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.

And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.

Re: GPU World

#143

Post by rbanffy »

bertylicious wrote: post #47
worldsayshi wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.

But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred s…

Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.

Re: GPU World

#144

Post by aa-jv »

david-gpu wrote: post #127
entropy47 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick. I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I w…

Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? An…

>Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.

In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.

I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)

It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.

Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?

Re: GPU World

#145

Post by rbanffy »

DrScientist wrote: post #132
alexashka wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.

A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not. Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.

> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero

Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.

Re: GPU World

#146

Post by rbanffy »

1718627440 wrote: post #91
bawolff wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most people still go to work every day, Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.

Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too. Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.

Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.

Re: GPU World

#147

Post by kakacik »

david-gpu wrote: post #127
entropy47 wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick. I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I w…

Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it. Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? An…

Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search.

My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.

Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.

For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.

Re: GPU World

#148

Post by alexashka »

petu wrote: post #136
alexashka wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.

Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff? If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time? You seem to equate birth rate with happiness, but ignore efficacy and availability of modern contraception.

> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?

Yes.

> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?

The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.

You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.

If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.

Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.

Re: GPU World

#149

Post by chrismorgan »

This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load).

Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.

(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)

Re: GPU World

#150

Post by flerovium114 »

xerlait wrote: post #137
maxnevermind wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a r…

I generally side with your skepticism, but there are verifiable domains with economic value such as drug discovery.

Are LLMs doing drug discovery? To my knowledge, that’s all classic “machine learning”
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