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As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

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Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#381

Post by rvnx »

newsclues wrote: post #238
torginus wrote: post #133

It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) producing these AI thingies (whose current economic is questionable value and actual future potential is up to hot debate), can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods.

First crypto now AI. I just want to play video games so I don’t have to interact with people

This might be the case already.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dead_Internet_theory

Even the multiplayer video games have bots...

Some of the users here are not real at all.

It's logical, if you want to push your product, be promoted on the first page of HN then you have to post fake comments using bots.

-> You get credibility and karma/trust for future submissions, and that's pretty much all you have to do.

Costs about 2 USD, can bring 2'000 USD in revenue, why wouldn't you want to "hustle" (like YC says) ?

Bots are here to grow, it will take time as for now the issue is still small, but you may already have interacted with bots, so do I.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#382

Post by vee-kay »

zahlman wrote: post #48
vee-kay wrote: post #38

For last 2 years, I've noticed a worrying trend: the typical budget PCs (especially Laptops) are being sold at higher prices with lower RAM (just 8GB) and lower-end CPUs (and no dedicated GPUs). Industry mandate should have become 16GB RAM for PCs and 8GB for mobile, since years ago, but instead it is as if computing/IT industry is regressing. New budget mobiles are being launched with lower-end specs as well (e.g.,…

I'm reading this thread on an 11-year-old desktop with 8GB of RAM and not feeling any particular reason to upgrade, although I've priced it out a few times just to see. Mint 22.x doesn't appear to be demanding any more of my machine than Mint 20.x. Neither is Firefox or most websites, although YouTube chat still leaks memory horrendously. (Of course, download sizes have increased.)

Try Win11 on that old PC, and you'll really feel the need for more RAM and a better CPU.

I sometimes feel M$ is deliberately making its Windows OS clunkier, so it can turn into a SaaS offering with a pricey subscription, like it has already successfully done with its MS-Office suite (Office 365 is the norm in corporates these days, though individuals have to shell out $100 per year for MS Office 365 Personal edition). We can still buy MS Office 2024 as standalone editions, but they are not cheap, because Micro$oft knows the alternatives on the market aren't good enough to be a serious threat.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#383

Post by api »

bogzz wrote: post #379
api wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again. Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where…

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong. Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.

How much room for creativity is there with a camera? Angle, lighting, F-stop, film type, film processing? I have a local image generator app called Draw Things that has many times more options than this.

Early synthesizers weren't that versatile either. Bands like Pink Floyd actually got into electronics and tore them apart and hacked them. Early techno and hip-hop artists did similar things and even figured out how to transform a simple record player into a musical instrument by hopping the needle around and scratching records back and forth with tremendous skill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NnRVmiqm84k

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ekgpZag6xyQ

Serious AI artists will start tearing apart open models and changing how they work internally. They'll learn the math and how they work just like a serious photographer could tell you all about film emulsions and developing processes and how film reacts to light.

Art's never about what it does. It's about what it can do.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#384

Post by xorcist »

ThunderSizzle wrote: post #380
xorcist wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The weird thing is that the AI companies themselves are hiring like there's no tomorrow, doing talent aquisitions etc. Why would you do that if the purpose of your product is to reduce necessary workforce? Why isn't that the first question that comes to mind for a journalist covering the latest acquisition? It's like an open secret that nobody really talks about.

Everyone is trying to be the shovel sales person for AI, not the gold diggers buying shovels. I'm not sure if even the LLM companies themselves are selling shovels yet. I think everyone is racing to find what the shovel of LLMs are.

It was collectively decided some time ago that this particular shovel is called nVIDIA.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#385

Post by RiverCrochet »

hansmayer wrote: post #321

I cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example: - Ghibli studio style graphics, - the infamous em-dashes and bullet points - customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...) - Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losi…

> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is?

Whenever you want.

Of course you can't directly control what other people do or how much they use t0echnology. But you have lots of direct control over what you use, even if it's not complete control.

I stopped taking social media seriously in the early 2010's. I'm preparing for a world of restricted, boring, corporate, invasive Internet, and developing interests and hobbies that don't rely on tech. We've had mechanisms to network people without communications tech for thousands of years, it's probably time to relearn those (the upper classes never stopped using them). The Internet will always be there, but I don't have to use it more than my workplace requires, and I can keep personal use of it to a minimum. Mostly that will mean using the Internet to coordinate events and meeting people and little else.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#386

Post by bloppe »

Ekaros wrote: post #348
parrellel wrote: post #335

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where have you seen 4 GB cut it in the last decade? 2 GB was enough to make Vista chug in 2007? I've got old linux boxes that feel fine with a couple gig of DDR3, but can't think of a place where that would be acceptable outside of that.

My entire question is why can't whatever users do on computers actually work on 2GB of RAM? Like what is the true reason we are in state that it is for some reason not possible? 2 GB is huge amount information. So surely it should be enough for almost all normal users, but for some reason it is not.

One potential reason: now that CPU clock speed is plateauing, parallelism is the main way to juice performance. Many apps try to take advantage of it by running N processes for N cores. For instance, my 22-core machine will use all 22 cores in parallel by default for builds with modern build systems. That's compiling ~22 files at once, using ~5x as much RAM as the 4-core machines of 15 years ago, all else being equal. As parallelism increases further, expect your builds to use even more memory.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#387

Post by yowlingcat »

RiverCrochet wrote: post #385
hansmayer wrote: post #321

I cannot stop thinking about the LLMs having this Midas touch quality, because everything they touch seems to ruin things or make people want to avoid them, for example: - Ghibli studio style graphics, - the infamous em-dashes and bullet points - customer service (just try to use Klarnas "support" these days...) - Oracle share price ;) - imagine being one of the worlds most solid and unassailable tech companies, losi…

> Where does it stop? When we decide to drop all technology as it is? Whenever you want. Of course you can't directly control what other people do or how much they use t0echnology. But you have lots of direct control over what you use, even if it's not complete control. I stopped taking social media seriously in the early 2010's. I'm preparing for a world of restricted, boring, corporate, invasive Internet, and devel…

I agree with you and I will also anecdotally note that I've been personally observing more and more of the younger generations (Z, esp gen Alpha) adopt these mechanisms en masse, viewing social media as the funhouse simulation of socialization that it always was and finding true social connection through other manners.

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#388

Post by IlliOnato »

bogzz wrote: post #379
api wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again. Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where…

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong. Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.

You may check these videos by Oleg Kuvaev. 100% generated using AI. Everything: text, music, characters, voices, editing -- all done via prompts, using multiple engines (I think he mentioned about a dozen services involved). I would not call it "high art", but it's definitely not a slop, it's an artist skillfully using AI as a tool.

https://youtu.be/A2H62x_-k5Q?si=EHq5Y4KCzBfo0tfm

https://youtu.be/rzCpT_S536c?si=pxiDY4TPhF_YLfRc

https://youtu.be/wPVe365vpCc?si=AqhpaZHYb4ldSf3F

https://youtu.be/EBaGqojNJfc?si=1CoLn4oeNxK-7bpe

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#389

Post by Pet_Ant »

bogzz wrote: post #379
api wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In previous eras there were many purists who considered photography not-art, sequencer and synthesizer made music not-music, other forms of (non-AI) digital art less legitimate than their more manual classical counterparts, etc. This is the same discourse all over again. Is electronic music where the artist composes it on a screen and then hits 'play' music? I think it is, of course, but I have had experiences where…

I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline, and I find the mention of a talent like Ansel Adams in this context asinine. There is no control there, and without control over creation I don't believe that creativity CAN flourish, but I may be wrong. Electronic music is analogous to digital art made by humans, not generated art.

> I don't believe that there is near enough room for creativity to shine through in the prompt-generation pipeline

I mean you are building a prompt and tweaking it. I mean even if you didn't do that you could still argue that finding it is in itself a creative akin to found art [1].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Found_object

Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise

#390

Post by tirant »

lysace wrote: post #267
tirant wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is factually wrong. That might be the case only for the infotainment system, but there’s usually many other ECUs in an EV. The ADAS ECUs are carrying similar amounts as an iPhone or the infotainment system. Telematics is also usually also a relatively complex one, but more towards lower sized amounts. Then you have around 3-5 other midsized ECUs with relatively high memory sizes, or at least enough to require MM…

So how many GB in total for a Tesla, or say a VW EV? Something like 16-32 GB? Is that not roughly like a $1k phone?

I cannot say, depends on the vehicle. But easily 50-64GB range.

If there’s three main ECUs at 16GB each, you’re already hitting 50GB. Add 2-4GB for mid size ecus, and anything in between KBs and some MB for small ECUs.

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