nothing because this shit is not "intelligence"
ppl are doing all sorts of gymnastics to tell claude to slow its roll with verbosity.
What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
71–80 of 151 posts
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#72Earlier quoted context omitted.
> But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger displays. People are a gas; they expand the fill the space they're in. If you give someone a big house, they'll fill it with crap. If you make food cheap, they'll eat too much, even when it harms their health. Making things cheaper usually just makes making them more prevalent. It's why computers are not faster than 20 years ago. Th…
You're right, computers are definitely the same speed as they were 20 years ago.
20 years ago is about when SSDs came to consumer PCs. Which is the last time I remember thinking that my computer became faster than the previous one was when it was new (if by computer we mean the hardware combined with a mainstream up-to-date software stack)
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#73I think speed is actually going to be a bigger factor than cost. Even projects where “money is no object” often hit a wall with LLM response times. Sure you can speed things up with parallel work under subagents, but as with parallelizing traditional computational tasks, there are diminishing gains. I keep hearing people saying just change the way you work to trust long-running agents and multi-task more, because the…
Given the 750 tok/sec GPT 5.6 Sol Ultrafast (via Cerebras), the many-1000 tok/sec Chinese models, and the 15000 tok/sec Taalas HC1, I think we're well on the way towards seeing that solved too. Combine the two, and yeah, wild ride incoming. What's especially bewildering to me is that translated back to raw bandwidth, even 15000 tok/sec is just like what, 75 KB/s? Extremely meager amounts of data, moving mountains. It…
One of my projects has an estimate of 3,000+ hours. It seems accurate. It has spent months working on it.
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
And why won’t the frontier models continue to become better? The open models are getting better but so are the frontier models. The frontier models might remain in a constant race to remain ahead
I don't think it's a matter of "staying ahead"; the proprietary frontier models are better, but the trouble for them is that open weight models are good enough in increasingly many cases. This raises the floor on the frontier companies and cuts their total addressable market by commodifying the easier LLM tasks. This is really the central argument of tfa :)
The big question is if there are larger economic gains to be made from ever greater intelligence. It seems to me like that may be the case for only a select few hard problems, while the vast majority of tasks approach their economic ceiling asymptotically with intelligence.
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
Anyone not living paycheck to paycheck is just constantly gorging on fast food?
I don't mean to be glib, but for the most part, yes. https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/11/well/child-obesity-un-rep... Obesity is nearly everywhere. In the old days, "prosperous" might have been a euphemism for "fat," as only the rich could afford to be fat. Now even people who are "food insecure" are often quite fat. Some of this of course is due to food quality, but ultimately there are no starving fat people.
How does "people will uncontrollably eat if given the chance" turn into "there are no starving fat people".
You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating . How is this relevant to your original point? Isn't it a complete contradiction to what you were saying before?
The original post was hyperbolic to the point of nonsense and now it seems we're on a completely different topic.
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#76I think a big one is robotics. A robot can today fold your laundry. It takes ~10mins per item. Seriously. It takes a long time to process the image find the corner move the claw to the corner of the shirt and attempt to straighten before folding. Robots right now generally move at glacial speeds. You might have seen robots doing flips in semi controlled environments but watch how slowly they open doors etc. processin…
Sensors are a huge challenge for robotics. We have very precise force-feedback on our joints, pressure and heat (temperature gradient) sensors all over our body, and our hands have a sensor density that allows us to count needle heads and detect the exact grip strength needed by feeling the micro-slippage of objects in our hands. Robots don't have that.
You can do backflips with pretty much just visual sensors for your environment, a good IMU for your spatial orientation, and some feedback on the position of a small number of really beefy joints and the force exerted on them. Folding laundry and opening doors is much more difficult, and trying to compensate with mostly vision requires going slow enough that things have time to move over appreciable distances before you take the next adjustment
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#77Jevons Paradox [1] > when technological improvements that increase the efficiency of a resource's use lead to a rise, rather than a fall, in total consumption of that resource. [1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox Las Vegas replaced the expensive incandescent lighting on the strip with cheaper to run LED equivalents. But the costs didn't come down because they were able to add more lights and larger dis…
Jevon's Paradox says nothing about the size of the incremental demand though. Lighting is a great example. The US went from spending 15% of our electricity on lighting to ~4%. LEDs are maybe 5x as efficient, so that would be 3% without any change in usage. So we did see maybe a 30% increase in consumption as a result of lower prices, but that was nowhere near large enough to offset the efficiency gain in terms of ove…
Intelligence is a lever, not a fluid. Power depends on how much force it can apply to specific points, not how much exists in general.
True high-intelligence outputs (Maxwell's equations, the Fourier Transform, quantum theory) are fundamentally transformative in ways that mid-high-competence (starting a generic B2B SaaS, making another CRUD app) aren't.
Which is why we've assumed we're already pretty far down the path to AI, but we really aren't. Solving random Erdős problems isn't the same as opening up a completely new kind of math/science with game changing practical applications.
I don't think you can get to that level with more compute and more tokens. I think it's going to take new higher level knowledge representations and new kinds of training to get there.
And the token count and compute may turn out to be lower than what we're using now.
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#78Earlier quoted context omitted.
Given the 750 tok/sec GPT 5.6 Sol Ultrafast (via Cerebras), the many-1000 tok/sec Chinese models, and the 15000 tok/sec Taalas HC1, I think we're well on the way towards seeing that solved too. Combine the two, and yeah, wild ride incoming. What's especially bewildering to me is that translated back to raw bandwidth, even 15000 tok/sec is just like what, 75 KB/s? Extremely meager amounts of data, moving mountains. It…
One of my projects has an estimate of 3,000+ hours. It seems accurate. It has spent months working on it.
Around the clock?
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#79I think a big one is robotics. A robot can today fold your laundry. It takes ~10mins per item. Seriously. It takes a long time to process the image find the corner move the claw to the corner of the shirt and attempt to straighten before folding. Robots right now generally move at glacial speeds. You might have seen robots doing flips in semi controlled environments but watch how slowly they open doors etc. processin…
Xiaomi robots do this in double digit seconds. Still slow compared to humans, but Chinese robots will be as successful as Chinese EVs, phones and solar panels.
~1min per shirt in a controlled environment. Better but still far away.
Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x
#80I think a big one is robotics. A robot can today fold your laundry. It takes ~10mins per item. Seriously. It takes a long time to process the image find the corner move the claw to the corner of the shirt and attempt to straighten before folding. Robots right now generally move at glacial speeds. You might have seen robots doing flips in semi controlled environments but watch how slowly they open doors etc. processin…
You must not have been paying attention to development with robots, there are many videos of robots moving really fast in "non controlled environments"
Most of these videos are still controlled in some manner. We are not yet at the age of throwing a robot in a home and doing n different dynamic tasks.