Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

catalystneuro.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 151 posts

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#81

Post by goatlover »

dboreham wrote: post #38
bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #15

Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds. That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for…

I think this viewpoint fails to understand what "intelligence" is. The idea must be that intelligence is some special thing that only humans have. So when machines couldn't do jack s... we said "it's the Turing test". When machines blew through the Turing test we said "that was just prediction..not really intelligence, that's different". It's not different. The delusion humans have is that intelligence is special and…

It's not about magic, it's that humans have an evolved embodied intelligence for surviving in the world as living organisms that reproduce, care for young and live in communities. That's quite a bit different from language models trained on human data.

Artificial intelligence is artificial. It can still be called intelligent, just not the same kind as biological since it's not remotely biological. It's human-like but also alien. To have something artificial be human you'd need something like replicants from Blade Runner which are synthetic biological robots.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#82

Post by infecto »

cush wrote: post #69

It’s way too early to tell the true cost of intelligence. Inference is still heavily subsidized, and training is apparently being funded by a mountain of free money

How do we know inference is heavily subsidized? Are all these third party Chinese model providers subsidizing the true cost?

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#83

Post by gs17 »

bellowsgulch wrote: post #25
andai wrote: post #22

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me". I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

Futurama did it first!

"Robot, experience this tragic irony for me!"

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#84

Post by Tade0 »

imnotr0b0t wrote: post #67

The article is solid. But there is a nuance what he skipped — quality vs price. Sure, GPT-5.6 Luna for pennies can do the same thing what Claude 4.5 Sonnet did for a dollar a year ago. Except Sonnet back then actually carried the codebase, while Luna... eh, not so much. And another thing, speed. You can make it cheaper as much as you want, but if a model thinks for half a minute you save cents but lose time.

The other day I saw a benchmark of coding models that fit in 8GB VRAM - for reference some version of Mistral was added, normally requiring 32GB, but moving along at 4-5tok/sec when partially offloaded to CPU.

Surprisingly, some of the small models would not only give worse results, but also took longer than Mistral, because they were thinking so much.

That is an important detail which I was previously overlooking.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#85

Post by everdrive »

jayd16 wrote: post #75
everdrive wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

>You're right that obesity is not necessarily linked to overeating

This can be true, but I think some people are confused. The vast majority of the time, it is linked to overeating. There are some edge cases where there is something else going on metabolically, but most people do over eat.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#86

Post by iririririr »

sssilver wrote: post #32
andai wrote: post #22

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me". I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

Hasn't the computer already been spending time with your wife?

it's called Instagram

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#88

Post by behringer »

wongarsu wrote: post #72
vanuatu wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

Your computer may not feel faster than a 20 year old PC, but CPUs have gotten way, way faster.

Compare the AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D to the AMD A12-9800, you go from 4 cores to 8, and you double the power consumption. But it's not twice as fast. It's 10 times faster. Depending on the exact metric, it could be as little as twice as fast or as much as 1000 times faster, depending on the exact operations.

On top of that memory throughput between DDR4 and DDR6 is about 2.5 times faster as well.

Oh and this isn't 20 years apart, this is 7 years apart. 20 years will see almost an exponentially larger gap even still.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#89

Post by iririririr »

bdhdhduuyd wrote: post #15

Personally I still see LLMs as very advanced search engines which lack intelligence. To me it seems that the cost of getting data is reduced by LLMs, not the cost of intelligence. I mean: we tell the model what we want to achieve, and the model responds with the right data in de form of code in seconds. That's why 'stackoverflow programmers' will have a hard time competing with LLMs but engineers are still needed for…

You're correct on the technology assessment.

But you forget all development today is just searching for a template, copy pasting, changing some small things. And a smart-ish search engine can do all that.

Re: What Happens When the Cost of Intelligence Drops 100x

#90

Post by nradov »

andai wrote: post #22

> Reading everything becomes the default. At a cent per document, a model can read every paper I love how in our day "reading everything" means "the computer reads it for me". I expect soon the computer will be able to go on bicycle rides, and spend time with my wife.

The next generation of bike computers will probably have links to an LLM cloud subscription service for real-time coaching and route planning.
Post reply on HN