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

GPU World

gpuworld.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 303 posts

Re: GPU World

#161

Post by 1718627440 »

rbanffy wrote: post #146
1718627440 wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.

Re: GPU World

#162

Post by calgoo »

entropy47 wrote: post #140
david-gpu wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways. I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't rea…

From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.

Re: GPU World

#163

Post by wjnc »

knollimar wrote: post #130
wjnc wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity. The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools a…

Construction isn't using LLMs any time soon like that. We don't even send our files in structured data because everyone's playing nose goes for liability and sending pdfs

I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.

An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.

Re: GPU World

#164

Post by spl757 »

What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.

Re: GPU World

#165

Post by keysersoze33 »

not2b wrote: post #10

Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.

Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself. While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects. (And of course training/model optimisations)

Re: GPU World

#166

Post by algoth1 »

chrismorgan wrote: post #149

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 JavaScri…

Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js

Re: GPU World

#167

Post by jephs »

divbzero wrote: post #16

Quite an interesting selection committee: Neal Stephenson Gwern Branwen Matt Huang

Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.

Re: GPU World

#169

Post by bsenftner »

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…

Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.

Re: GPU World

#170

Post by roel_v »

stevepotter wrote: post #156
roel_v wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?

Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.

But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.
Post reply on HN