GPU World

One of the amazing things is that when every has one GPU, they will actually have 1k-10k agents at their disposal.

LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.

This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.

> a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.

As you say, that is a weak counter point. I do get what you're saying, but crypto flaws were built in from the start:

- Deflationary currency isn't going to be spent, it is going to be hoarded, if it would have any value at all. The design was self defeating from the very start.

- Technical limits of PoW. Obvious right from the start, which led to the block wars. PoS "solves" that but with other costs. And it still doesn't solve the first point.

Despite these, crypto did get adopted, just not in any way that crypto maximalists said it would. It got hoarded, as expected.

But the real test is: If crypto disappeared tomorrow, would the world notice or really care? I would argue, apart from people losing money, most of the world wouldn't even notice it was gone.

There is no way you could say that for LLMs.

I haven't got 1000 words in me, but here's what I think might make for a plausible story. Maybe a little too Matrix adjacent!:

The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence.

The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners.

New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model.

We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous.

The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress.

To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations.

But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt.

We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases.

But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'.

A new religion was started, and chaos followed.

> It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete

Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop. My experience with this is not encouraging. Getting it to work requires sprinkling some context magic and hoping and praying the LLM does the right thing. More astrology or religion and less science. Great for use cases with humans-in-the-loop, but less than impressive when you need determinism and reliable operation.