Earlier quoted context omitted.
So fun. Photography is neither cheap nor low effort. Ask AI about it.
I literally just took a photo with my iPhone. So easy, took seconds.
and painting is so easy you can do it with dirt and a stick
As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
501–510 of 536 posts
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#502Earlier quoted context omitted.
Alternatively, we'll see a drop in deployment diversity, with more and more functionality shifted to centralised providers that have economies of scale and the resources to optimise. E.g. IDEs could continue to demand lots of CPU/RAM, and cloud providers are able to deliver that cheaper than a mostly idle desktop. If that happens, more and more of its functionality will come to rely on having low datacenter latencies…
I’d feel better about the RAM price spikes if they were caused by a natural disaster and not by Sam Altman buying up 40% of the raw wafer supply, other Big Tech companies buying up RAM, and the RAM oligopoly situation restricting supply. This will only serve to increase the power of big players who can afford higher component prices (and who, thanks to their oligopoly status, can effectively set the market price for…
> companies that can afford inflated prices will take advantage of the situation to pull ahead of competitors who can't afford tech at inflated tech
These big companies are competing with each other, and they're willing and able to spend much more for compute/RAM than we are.
> I don’t know what we can do as normal people other than making do with the hardware we have and boycotting Big Tech, though I don’t know how effective the latter is.
A few ideas:
* Use/develop/optimise local tooling
* Pool resources with friends/communities towards shared compute.
I hope prices drop sooner than projects dev tools all move to the cloud.
It's not all bad news: as tooling/builds move to the cloud, they'll become available to those that have thus far been unable or unwilling to afford a fast computer to be mostly idle.
This is a loss of autonomy for those who were able to afford such machines though.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#503Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Factually wrong.
That's at least 52 GB.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#504Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a very optimistic scenario for AI companies - that AI capable of replacing knowledge workers can be developed using the current batch of hardware, in the span of a year or two. I'm really interested in what will happen to the economy/society in this case. Knowledge workers are the market for much that money is being made on. Facebook and Google make most of their money from ads. Those ads are shown to billions of p…
> But maybe I'm just too dumb to understand the world that these big players exist in and am missing some big detail. Don’t forget Sam Altman publicly said they have no idea how to make money, and their brilliant plan is to develop AGI (which they don’t know how and aren’t close to) then ask it how to generate revenue. https://www.startupbell.net/post/sam-altman-told-investors-b... Maybe this imaginary AGI will final…
> Don’t forget Sam Altman publicly said they have no idea how to make money, and their brilliant plan is to develop AGI (which they don’t know how and aren’t close to) then ask it how to generate revenue.
If you've got AGI, it should be pretty easy to generate revenue in the short term: competent employee replacements at a fraction of the cost of a real person, with no rights or worker protections to speak of. The Fortune 500 would gobble it up.
Then you've got a couple years to amass trillions and buy up the assets you need to establish a self-sustaining empire (energy, raw materials, manufacturing).
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#505Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Defining art in this way is like defining intelligence as the possession of a degree from Stanford. It's just branding. Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here. Other than the technological aspect, there's nothing new under the sun here. And at its very worst, AI art is just Andy Warhol at hypersca…
> Art shouldn't make you feel comfortable and safe. It should provoke you and in this sense AI art is doing the job better than traditional art at the moment here.
jumpscares and weapons being used at others aren't art
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#506Earlier quoted context omitted.
> AI slop is to AI art what point and shoot amateur photography is to artistic photography. Sorry... It's all slop buddy. The medium is the message, and genAI's message is "I want it cheap and with low effort, and I don't care too much about how it looks"
So art is just a status signifier? "This is hard to make so I must be really special"?
At the very least, art usually contains effort signifiers. Yes, an artist could potentially employ gingerbread men cut from construction paper in a work, but no, construction paper gingerbread men are typically not in the same league as David.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#507Earlier 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 know that you can give a drawing as input for image generation, right? I think there's a lot of creativity possible with AI image generation. Things like ControlNet and the various loras and upscale methods etc all add a lot of choice.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#508Earlier 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…
Keyboards have had functions that let them play music at the touch of button for decades. Decades later we still don't consider anyone using that function a musician. >actual artists who use AI as a tool to make novel forms and styles of art. writing a prompt lol We don't compare Usain Bolt to Lewis Hamilton when talking about fastest runners in the world. But hey think about how much money you could save on a weddin…
The (wedding) photographer is likely going to use this AI themselves though. They used Photoshop way back in the day to touch up images. They're going to be doing the same with genAI. Content-aware fill is one of the most useful tools they have.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#509Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
And memory. What I'm surprised by is that memory production isn't being scaled up since it's basically a universal part of any computing device.
Re: As AI gobbles up chips, prices for devices may rise
#510Earlier quoted context omitted.
> It's somewhat alarming to see that companies (owned by a very small slice of society) ... can easily price the rest of humanity out of computing goods. If AI lives up to the hype, it's a portent of how things will feel to the common man. Not only will unemployment be a problem, but prices of any resources desired by the AI companies or their founders will rise to unaffordability.
Affordable computing is what created the economy. If you take that away people in poorer countries can no longer afford a phone. Without a phone a lot things that we consider a given will not be functional anymore. The gaming industry alone including phones is a whooping $300bn. This will take a significant hit if people have to pay a fortune to build a rig, or if their phones are so under-powered that they can't eve…
An important thing to add: the gaming industry was basically the R&D that (partly) led to this AI in the first place. GPUs were gaming devices first and foremost. The programmable pipeline came about because people wanted their video games to look better.
Furthermore, Stable Diffusion was (is) absolutely a large component to all of this. And a lot of that effort was grass roots: random people online can't together to figure out ways to generate better images.
It would be quite ironic if the next revolution comes about on Intel or AMD (or some Chinese company's) hardware because those GPUs were more affordable.