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After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

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Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#141

Post by pixl97 »

paufernandez wrote: post #103
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

In my case I fully grasp what such a future could be, but I don't think we are on the path to that, I believe people are too optimistic, i.e. they just believe instead of being truly skeptical. From where I look at it, LLMs are flawed in many ways, and people who see progress as inevitable do not have a mental model of the foundation of those systems to be able to extrapolate. Also, people do not know any other forms…

Symbolic AI is mostly dead, we spend a lot of time and money on it and got complex and fragile systems that are far worse than LLMs.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#142

Post by dcminter »

Findecanor wrote: post #106
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”

"Empty vessels make the loudest noise" as my headmaster used to rather pointedly quote to me from time to time.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#143

Post by bradleyjg »

bitmasher9 wrote: post #112
bee_rider wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The full quote is: > Most of the money is being spent on incredibly expensive GPUs that have a 1-3 year lifespan due to becoming obsolete quickly and wearing out under constant, high-intensity use. So it isn’t entirely tied to the rate of obsolescence, these things apparently get worn down from the workloads. In terms of performance improvement, it is slightly complicated, right? It turns out that it was possible to…

The failure rate of GPUs in professional datacenter environments is over estimated by the general public because of the large number of overlocked and undercooled cards used for GPU mining that hit eBay.

What’s the strategy when one does die? It’s just left in place until it’s worth it to pull the entire rack?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#144

Post by dcminter »

mikert89 wrote: post #109
Findecanor wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

“The ability to speak does not make you intelligent.”

again, only a few years ago, the concept of a real time voice conversation with a computer was straight out of science fiction

This is true. The old original series (and later) Star Trek computers being able to interpret normal idiomatic humam speech and act upon it was, to those in the know, hilariously unrealistic until very suddenly just recently it wasn't. Pretty cool.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#145

Post by ogogmad »

paufernandez wrote: post #103
mikert89 wrote: post #4

I cant believe people still arent grasping the profound implications of computers that can talk and make decisions.

In my case I fully grasp what such a future could be, but I don't think we are on the path to that, I believe people are too optimistic, i.e. they just believe instead of being truly skeptical. From where I look at it, LLMs are flawed in many ways, and people who see progress as inevitable do not have a mental model of the foundation of those systems to be able to extrapolate. Also, people do not know any other forms…

Not sure this is a good counterpoint in defence of LLMs, but I'm reminded of how Unix people explain why (in their experience) data should be encoded, stored and transmitted as text instead of something more seemingly natural like binary. It's because text provides more ways to read and transform it, IN SPITE of its obvious inefficiency. LLMs are the ultimate Unix text transformation filter. They are extremely flexible out-of-the-box, and friendly towards experimentation.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#146

Post by tyleo »

rz2k wrote: post #108

Local/open-weight models are already incredibly competent. Right now a Mac Studio with 256GB can be found for less than $5000, and an equivalent workstation will likely be 50% cheaper in a year. If anything that price is higher because of the boom, rather than subsidized by a potential bubble. It can run a 8bit quant of GPT-OSS 120B, or 4bit quant of GLM-4.6 using only an extra 100-200W. That energy use comes out to…

I have an M4 MBP and I also think Apple is set up quite nicely to take real advantage of local models.

They already work on the most expensive Apple hardware. I expect that price to come down in the next few years.

It’s really just the UX that’s bad but that’s solvable.

Apple isn’t having to pay for each users power and use either. They sell hardware once and folks pay with their own electricity to run it.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#147

Post by andy99 »

Cell phones have been through how many generations between the 80s and now? All the past generations are obsolete, but the investment in improving the technology (which is really a continuation of WWII era RF engineering) means we have readily available low cost miniature comms equipment. It doesn’t matter that the capex on individual phones was wasted.

Same for GPUs/LLMs? At some point things will mature and we’ll be left with plentiful, cheap, high end LLM access, on the back of the investment that has been made. Whether or not it’s running on legacy GPUs, like some 90s fiber still carries traffic, is meaningless. It’s what the investment unlocks.

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#149

Post by joshuahedlund »

harvey9 wrote: post #66
rjh29 wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Who's going to pay to run those models? They are currently running at a huge loss.

I can run quite useful models on my PC. Might not change the world but I got a usable transcript of an old foreign language TV show and then machine translated to English. It is not as good as professional subtitles but i wasn't willing to pay the cost of that option.

Won’t those models gradually become outdated (for anything related to events that happen after the model was trained, new code languages or framework versions, etc) if no one is around to continually re-train them?

Re: After the AI boom: what might we be left with?

#150

Post by rootusrootus »

muldvarp wrote: post #129
Juliate wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point is, after the bubble burst, will there be enough funds, cash flow and... a viable market, to make these still run?

Inference is not that expensive. I'd argue that most models are already useful enough that people will pay to run them.

At $20/month for Claude, I'm satisfied. I'll keep paying that for what I get from it, even if it never improves again.
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