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Fable and the end of the free lunch

dbreunig.com

121–130 of 268 posts

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#121
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on asics.

IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them. When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through…

> We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winn..

Sorry to cut you off, but have you looked at Nvidia's numbers since the NFT craze? They won.

Sell shovels in a gold rush, make better shovels, repeat on the next rush.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The drones don't manufacture themselves, maintain themselves, reload their own ammunition, mine and refine the materials that are used to make them and their ammunition, or operate the power plants needed for all of the above. "AI" isn't going to control diddly squat.

There's a huge amount of research into embodied AI (and, also, people seem to be a lot more ok with manufacturing bullets than pulling triggers).

You did not read much about history, did you? Or law. If you embed AI into a gun ... you just created a bomb. It is still you who killed whoever it kills.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#123
post #2

The real revolution is Deepseek v4 flash and similar models (GPT 5.6 Luna, muse spark 1.2, mimo, etc...) - Genuinely good performance for a tiny fraction of the cost of Fable and even GLM etc... I think a lot of people would be very content if they never got smarter, and just kept getting even cheaper/faster. Of course, both things continue to happen on a seemingly monthly basis

The real revolution is both. The cost and capability of frontier intelligence will go up AND the cost of "good enough" intelligence will go down.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#125
post #86
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would you need brain emulation to get superhuman intelligence?

Are you making a serious argument that superhuman intelligence is a plausible outcome of training LLMs on everything humanity knows so far? Or are you making the generic assertion that AGI is theoretically possible via means other than emulating the human brain? Because the latter is a strawman (nobody has asserted anything to the contrary), and I have seen no evidence at all to support the former.

What is meant by 'superhuman intelligence'? Certainly it seems to be the case that LLMs are capable of a sort of 'polyhuman' intelligence, in that the same LLM that advances mathematics with a novel proof can add unit testing for a new software feature, design a recipe, and create an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle. As generalists I'd say they're already 'superhuman'.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidence actually supports that capabilities are leveling off, and cheaper/faster is not really coming. Just log-linearly more capability at smaller parameter counts as they saturate.

Cheaper/faster is coming for sure. Model on a custom silicon: https://chatjimmy.ai/ 1-bit models that run on a CPU: https://github.com/microsoft/BitNet

Blazing fast...but terrible. Put Sol on silicon but will still need access to the internet...so it will be somewhat slow anyway

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#127
post #46
post #40

"When Moore’s Law slowed in the mid-2000s" it did not, in fact, slow down in the mid 2000s, or at all. https://ourworldindata.org/data-insights/moores-law-has-accu...

You've selectively quoted the article. The full quote (emphasis added): "When Moore’s Law slowed in the mid-2000s ( specifically, single-threaded performance stagnated ), we suddenly had to think about parallelization, architecture, memory locality, etc." Your link is talking about transistor count. The article is talking about single-threaded performance. Today's CPUs are faster in large part because they have more…

And more cores means what exactly in terms of transistors count?

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#128
post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on asics.

IMO many are still missing a big part of the picture. We're looking at the potential for a massive scale level of automation of [x], which happens to be a huge part of the economy, and people are wondering which player in [x] is going to be the biggest winner. I think the historically precedented answer is none of them. When the Industrial Revolution came along it did create 'super farms' relative to the past through…

I agree that the winners would be doing stuff in the physical world.

And there I think the winner would be China.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which are the kinds of tasks computers have been historically quite good at. It's impressive that it does what it does, don't get me wrong. But if you expect it to replace the likes of GPT 5.6 Luna, let alone Sol? Nah.

Computers have historically been good at answering word problems fed to them verbatim?

No, but they were good at answering formalized versions of the same word problems.

What this tells us is that a 3B LLM can retain enough NLU to understand those word problems. Which isn't particularly surprising?

And also that the same LLM can solve a math or logic problem it understands. Which is a lot more impressive, because early LLMs were already quite good at NLU, but notoriously bad at things like math, logic and iterative problem solving. This 3B model existing tells us we're beginning to figure out how to imbue models with those capabilities reliably.

Re: Fable and the end of the free lunch

#130
post #61
post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

imo this is the problem some of these labs are gonna face, because open models will do this just fine and you as the consumer don't need to pay their training costs especially considering imo most use falls under this instead of those kind of tasks where you'd need the SOTA

Yeah. Sometimes I wonder who the long term financial winners will be from the ai boom. It might be ram / gpu manufacturers. Or whoever cracks putting LLMs on asics.

Or perhaps customers / users?

Just like Wikipedia put classic encyclopedias out of business, but wasn't really a financially win for anyone.

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