This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load).
Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.
(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like?
If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
> I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
Yes, for a verifiable domains you can set up a harness and brute-force a search space if you have enough money for compute. Why do you think they keep coming up with those examples of impressive achievements like solving math puzzles? Why not focus on something with economic value to it? My answer is they can't, those are hard problems, those require building an actual product, those require reliability.
> EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
We are not people people on the street we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
Most notably Paul Krugman Nobel winning economist in 98:
"By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."
I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity.
The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)
Construction isn't using LLMs any time soon like that. We don't even send our files in structured data because everyone's playing nose goes for liability and sending pdfs
I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.
An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.
This take is unfathomable to me. How are LLMs not massively revolutionary, despite them not being infallible? This comment reminds me of there being competitions for finding useful purposes for electricity when it was first discovered. Imagine talking about the usefulness of LLMs while thinking that LLMs in 2026 just compress a few TB of data into a set of weights and that's all they work with lol.
Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick.
I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.
Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways.
I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.
> Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons.
Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories:
1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes.
The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
>Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.
I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)
It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.
Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search.
My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.
Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.
For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.
But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.
The TAM of electricity is 99.999% of humanity, yet there was 82 years between Alessandro Volta's Voltaic Pile experiments and the first electrical grid in the world, Pearl Street Station, New York City.
A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is not a lot of work in this space right now, because programming and math are infinitely more verifiable, and the capabilities of never models would probably invalidate any usecases, but if the model progress slows down, all attention will go towards making them work for any aspect of production.
Fair points (and I appreciate very much that they read like a human wrote them). As a counter point - and I know it's a weak one - a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.
I want to believe there is big bucks in this technology - my employer is tied up in it and so is my compensation. I just find it personally very unremarkable in a way that I never did with phones or the internet. When I got my first phone, or first started using Dogpile for research - I saw immediate value, and would have paid big bucks to keep it in my life. AI has had a few years and a huge amount of investment (time and money) and if it disappeared overnight I wouldn't pay $10 to get it back. I keep trying it, there's just something missing in my brain where it should be clicking for me :(
Nitpick or two. Holborn in London was a little earlier. Also neither was really a grid. That took another ~45 years. Maybe that's better for your argument - but I'm not quite sure that the analogy fully holds - as it's a different class of infrastructure problem.
Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.
In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.
For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.
"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"
And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.
The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.
"but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures."
So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.
And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.
We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that.
The question really becomes "why would we want that?". The main reason you'd want an AI that can focus on a task forever is to completely remove the human from the loop. That's something we should be cautious about.
I do not think agents need to work continuously. They "just"
need to work on a project longer than an employee is able to
work on it for them to be commercially useful. Although this
does not consider that agents might take a shorter or longer
amount of time for the same task. Therefore, we should begin
to compare these in tasks completed during that time instead.
Not sure about that. The nature of work changes if you have some[one|thing] that can work on it continuously forever. The goal of using AI shouldn't be to do the things a person does; it should be to do the things a person would be able to do if they had (practically) unlimited time.
This is one of the inflection points around working with AI. When your thinking shifts from "AI does what the person used to do" to "AI does something different that leads to the same outcome as before, but with all that cool stuff I'd love to have the time for", then the equation changes. For example, I will never write another app that doesn't have 100% test coverage again. I stress- and soak-test everything these days. That's changing how I write code - I need to write things in ways that have deterministic harnesses for things mutable state outside of my immediate control (like random numbers or datetimes or state loaded from a save) so that I can task AI with building a fuzzer that does tens of thousands of random tests on every push to see if anything broke. I couldn't do that in the past because it was always effort that a client wouldn't get enough value from to pay me to do it. I can do those things now. It's ace.
(Everywhere I put 'I' you can replace with 'AI of the Week')
Throw understanding images in there and it becomes less true in my experience. Sure they shit out code and search text well, but one infographic and they circle trying to rasterize it.
> LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all.
I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
It's also at the same time downplaying just how valuable "nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers" could be, just like computers did for us "highly motivated expert knowledge workers" in the first place. Or computers isn't a "foundational technology" either?
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable. If you were a problem solver and entrepreneur you could go and apply those on small scale, get profits, reinvest, set up a flywheel, build a fortune on the top of those, there were a lot of low hanging fruit due to the fact that the foundation was laid out, a break-even period of James Watt steam engine was like 2-3 years I believe until everyone saw it and margins flattened. Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
> We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
Cool, you're still a person who share their thoughts, just like the people who had similar reactions to when computers and the internet first came around. So many people were railing against the internet with "You'll never make payments over the internet", "it's too slow" and whatever. To the surprise of none of us nerds, the internet eventually ate the whole world and now large swaths of the population can't imagine life without it, for better or worse.
> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.
You're comparing the reliability of huge ecosystems after they've gone mainstream, after decades, with something that is a couple of years old, hardly a fair comparison. Instead, compare where LLMs are today with the first years of computers, the internet and all that, and maybe you'll gain a new perspective on where LLMs are? None of those things were reliable initially and in many cases, involved actual human deaths before safety actually caught up.
Even when I got started with using the internet, which isn't that long time ago but around the modem-era, things were not so reliable or simple as they are today.
Computers were made and automated lots of work, even though it was still us operating those computers and making and running those automations. But eventually computers took over and running so much of the world.
Now LLMs are automating the computers themselves. This is a whole new layer that we never had before, not in this amount or with this much availability. It is not "not foundational".
> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes
Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.
> there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities
Yes, but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.
Btw I meant bigger and bigger amount of data of extracted reasoning chains when you go deeper and generate more and more of them in your attempt to describe the universe, the amount of permutations explodes. And it seems LLMs can't workaround that because they don't build world model inside so they can't deduct it from pre-built world/object model, they must memorize it and look it up later.
The thing that would change it a lot is that people would start trading away their GPUs, because some people would get vastly more economic use out of them.
Absolutely untrue. LLM will be the automation force of everything. It will connect and orchestrate our entire society. It will be a much bigger impact that any other revolution in the past. Our lives will be unrecognizable in 10 years from now.
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.
> Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
The more I use Fable the more impressed I am with it. I am still learning how to use it, same with gpt-5.6-sol. I don't think the model has changed much, but both models have gotten smarter in leaps and bounds as I've improved the documentation, context, how I provide work to them and how I specify success.
(And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.)
I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.
I find it interesting that we are still talking in terms of modifying our behaviour to accommodate the tools. Surely the point of LLMs is not to "learn how to use it" but as an extension of our own unique capabilities - the most personalised tool in all of history.
The point of any tool is to learn how to use it best. That's the difference between slicing off your arm, or building a chair.
LLMs don't read minds. There's always a chasm between you (your ideas) and them becoming reality. Exactly how people cross that chasm is all the rage right now, and there are a million ways to do it - but just expecting the LLM to pull details out of a few words isn't going to produce anything decent.
You're gonna need both to be able to work with it effectively though, just like working with your hands and wood isn't the same as working with abstract architectures via characters and words on a screen, like we've done since the beginning of programming with English language rather than just numbers and formulations, like how it was in the beginning.
Going further, even programming languages "asks" that you change the way you work to make the most use of them. A Clojure developer has a very different development process than a Rust developer, and they're both efficient, right and correct in their ecosystem, but the experience differs vastly and Clojure for example would change you to fit itself, rather than the opposite.
I think I would actually characterize it as a mutual change - obviously the model doesn't change as far as I can tell, but changing the harness and context changes its behavior so wildly that it might as well. Bit of a pas de deux - I learn, I change the context to teach it, it teaches me in turn, rinse and repeat.
I finished reading it recently, too. I thought it was quirky, delightful, and obviously exaggerated for entertainment and contemplation purposes. I've recommended it to a bunch of people, too!
It triggered one of my favorite weird activities: after reading a book that I fully enjoyed and feel was completely "worth it," I give myself a few days to float on that happy feeling. Then, I go look at specifically only one and two star reviews. And laugh. Man, some people hated that book!
Note that otherwise, as a rule, I basically never read reviews of entertainment, restaurants, hotels and similar before nor after. I'm just not interested.
My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago.
Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.
I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.
No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.
In the limited pockets of society you experience directly.
How much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia, the economic inequalities globally, or even in the West, etc...
if you look at macro, everything moves according to laws that have little to do with the even distribution of technology and a lot to do with the decision makers that get to pick how that distribution takes place.
That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from.
I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?
You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.
I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.
A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.
If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.
And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.
Life in Asia and Africa has changed pretty dramatically, and improvements are accelerating. Yeah, we're not in utopia yet, but more people than ever live comfortable, safe lives. "Business at the speed of light" has become a reality, and we're still getting to grips with it. We dealt with a global pandemic with an efficiency never seen before - had it happened in the previous century, we would have probably seen "black death" levels of casualties.
Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.
Well, population explosions tend to happen in hellholes and sensible declines happen in civilized society. The term happiness of course isn't something you can measure that easily, though.
Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate.
Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero
Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.
I don't think I can do any better than you by asking the most advanced LLM to be as pedantic as possible whilst not addressing anything actually being said.
> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?
Yes.
> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.
You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.
If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.
Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.
Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.
Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.
I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
> Turned out: not much have changed
Changed a lot, I am getting to know what a random person living some where in the world think about what change it has brought
> What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.
I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative.
Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't).
I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself.
While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects.
(And of course training/model optimisations)
Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption.
Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
I think personalized suriveillance and manipulation (thought control, manipulating people through filtering of content they receive) on a level any dictator would drool over can be gotten for a fraction of 1 GPU per person.
current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts
But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.
To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.
Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.
So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.
But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.
The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then):
((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.
AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.
> If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person...
Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.
I mean, why would we wait til then? AMD is buying a company that put LLama 3.1 7b(or something close) on silicon, and can give you 15k t/s, Qwen just released Qwen 3.8 Next that seperates the intelligence from the database, so the intelligence is 6b and the rest can be done on CPU. You can put that 6b on the AMD silicon, and then use another accelerator to speed up the database if you need fast PP, and you are now much faster than the B300 after optimizations such as caching the Prompt once, and keeping it around, and many others.
Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.
If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
It really isn't and it's sad seeing so many people say it so confidently on this site. It only detects plain / basic prompted stuff. "write me an essay on x", sure. The moment you prompt it differently, it stops working. Add "output should be STE100 compliant" or something to your prompts and detection goes away. Fine-tune any local llm on real human prose, and detection goes away. Edit 2-3 characters (emdashes, lists, etc) and detection goes away.
And that's for just basic detection. There have been plenty of examples of 100% human written content (either old, or unpublished) that gets falsely flagged as AI.
And these are just technical aspects. The main issue is that pangram and other solutions are being used to summarily judge students work, and that is orders of magnitude more fucked up. Accusing someone of cheating can have devastating effects on their education/career/etc. and they're doing it with snake-oil closed boxes, at scale. We really really shouldn't support this, especially here on a technical site.
No it isn't. I've put human written material in there (my own unpublished material) and it says 90%+ AI. Then I put some AI material in and it said 30% chance of AI.
I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
Looking at the trends, local AI is the future, smaller models are getting faster and high demands always leads to oversupply if you've got resources, just look at all the AI data-centers, If small models go mainstream GPU's and data-centers will become dirt-cheap.
The premise of the story is silly. If AI gets cheaper and faster, then it certainly will get smarter (just not in the raw sense) as harnesses, tool access, memory, etc. improve. You can’t hold intelligence as a fixed variable but then imply other aspects of it improve
Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
I think the point of stories like these is to accept that the world is too complex to fit into a story but we can try to fit a part of it anyway and we might learn something from it or at least get an interesting experience.
Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
> What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365
One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
Good argument going here but here is what internet tells me about 'facts':
Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around.
In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
with a good enough LLM you can greatly increase the capability to build a functioning well (and other basic infrastructures) in remote and undeveloped areas without great technical knowledge, they are very good as assistants for practical tasks where you can give feedback step by step on what is happening
Will any of the data submitted be used in training? We are all given the prompt and you will get a few thousand (maybe tens of thousands of submissions). Seems like a great source of training material.
I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave.
That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI.
Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.
We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.
They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.
They're not going to create anything.
Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).
If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is.
The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course.
And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least.
You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid.
I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.
This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load).
Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.
(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js
> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like?
If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
> I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology.
Yes, for a verifiable domains you can set up a harness and brute-force a search space if you have enough money for compute. Why do you think they keep coming up with those examples of impressive achievements like solving math puzzles? Why not focus on something with economic value to it? My answer is they can't, those are hard problems, those require building an actual product, those require reliability.
> EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
We are not people people on the street we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
I generally side with your skepticism, but there are verifiable domains with economic value such as drug discovery.
Are LLMs doing drug discovery? To my knowledge, that’s all classic “machine learning”
Most notably Paul Krugman Nobel winning economist in 98: "By 2005 or so, it will become clear that the Internet’s impact on the economy has been no greater than the fax machine’s."
Predicting the future is hard.
I share this sentiment, while deploring the current AI board room sentiment. I know some people that design (safe) buildings. They use software all the time for their load-bearing work (lol). Think about the creativity that could be unleashed if that (like LEAN for math) becomes a commodity.
The same thing for my job: creating insurance premiums is somewhat hard but not stellar. A combination of skills, data, tools and people. I can imagine a future where you can post a 'have good weather on holiday or money back' bond on a platform. (I can think of more serious applications...) The sheer diversity and amount of liquidity AI's can create is enormous. (Switching to a very general outlook here.) And with liquidity hopefully comes more specificity in the ROI on saving our planet. (Or the disproving of the necessity thereof, if that is your outlook.)
Construction isn't using LLMs any time soon like that. We don't even send our files in structured data because everyone's playing nose goes for liability and sending pdfs
I know! And financials and actuaries aren't either. Excel, Python, R and don't know what we can use ducktape and spit for to keep together. But as the LEAN-example quite nicely shows: with the right scaffolding I am convinced the GPU World /could/ look rosy.
An economic problem would be - how could the builder of a scaffold capture _some_ value without right away be copied. The fact that LLMs threw away every protection of intellectual property at their inception makes it a lot harder to invest in (with the goal of capturing some) value. I am at least /somewhat/ influenced by RMS on the 'seductive mirage' of IP but I have my doubts on how copyleft could bring more than breadcrumbs to those who build scaffolds.
This take is unfathomable to me. How are LLMs not massively revolutionary, despite them not being infallible? This comment reminds me of there being competitions for finding useful purposes for electricity when it was first discovered. Imagine talking about the usefulness of LLMs while thinking that LLMs in 2026 just compress a few TB of data into a set of weights and that's all they work with lol.
Whichever side of the divide you're on, I think it's really weird that on a site like HN (where people have at least a passing familiarity with technology) there are such polarised takes on whether it's the next industrial revolution, or a technological parlour trick.
I'm giving away which side I'm on now, but most of the TAM have experienced the product at this point, and trillions of dollars have been invested. I would wager most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.
That polarizing take is magnified by our failure to teach how to manage discussions that contain controversy and disagreement. Then there is the fact that most people's idea of debate is some game of dominance and not to find solutions.
Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons. Ask yourself: are regular people using this tech, either as producers or consumers? And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
It's very hard to disagree with the point that it will get more powerful, perhaps in uenxpected ways.
I don't know that the average regular person is using this tech as a producer, and while it's hard not to consume it - I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to. I'm in a bubble of people where we give it a lot more mindshare, but e.g my electrician is aware of the tech, knows what it does, and doesn't really care. I think you're right that if it could manage his books, help him rewire a switchboard, order inventory for him etc that would be very different.
From what i hear in a small subset of local small businesses is that they are using it for backoffice stuff, like taxes, finding legal codes, organization, planning etc.
> Funnily, none of that mattered. What mattered is that enough ordinary people on the street found it useful, both for personal and business reasons.
Broad economic impact due to Internet boom in the the US came from 2 main categories: 1) New huge internet enabled tech companies appeared(Amazon, Google, Meta etc.), all created their own products, all were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology. 2) Existing legacy companies could utilize internet to connect their teams/departments/offices though a bunch of new software which were build on reliable foundational technology. LLMs is not a reliable foundational technology.
> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.
This mantra is being repeated but "serious LLMs's issues" I described are still there and will be there because they are part of how LLMs are built and work. Without addressing those you can't build products but LLMs's capability as a personal productivity tool will keep rising, yes.
The "best" possible outcome of LLMs to a broader economy might be that a smaller group of experts will be able to do the job in companies due to boost of their personal productivity and a bunch of people will be freed up(laid off) and they will have to go and work on something else and thus a boost of productivity in the economy. But it seems it won't be any low hanging fruits(problems to solve) this time as it was during the internet era. It is not like we out of problems: new cancer treatments, self driving cars, nuclear fusion, modular nuclear reactors etc. There is a huge value to capture there, here is the thing though, those are hard problems, it is not a new TikTok, gmail, netflix etc. Yes, people will have LLMs now but can we actually start solving hard problems with them? Because it might be the case that a gravy train of the last few decades for Silicon Valley is over, no more useless internet enabled services, no more billion dollar companies built on just applying internet to yet another thing and producing another digital product. People's free time is limited, its redistribution across digital services will not grow the economy, global internet penetration is already pretty high and won't grow that much, so there might not be much value to capture there.
>Did you experience the popularization of the WWW? There were massive disagreements even among smart tech-savvy people. We even had a stock market boom and just cycle associated with it.
In the early phase of the Internet envelope, we all wanted to build the real Internet and destroy the AOL's and Compuserves' .. but now the Internet has turned into a mass of AOL's and Compuserves.
I think the same thing is happening with the silo'ization of LLM's. People don't want to have to use the "AOL of LLM's" for things - they want to build out their own infrastructure and have a pool of local LLM's (where once it was the company's own modem pool, etc.)
It is, oddly enough, parallel with the original arguments in the 70's and 80's regarding supercomputers versus personal computers, or the cloud versus locally managed resources, etc. We are still fighting this battle, just with higher bandwidth.
Do we operate a terminal with a fixed window into a bigger computer, or do we operate a heavier local computer with a proper interface?
Most people I know, blue and white collar up to and including surgeons and IT folks, use it as better search.
My wife is a GP, and all she would ever need is a reliable speech to voice recognition of medical jargon, in french. Not 98%, not almost there, just there.
Most people don't live in IT echo chambers like HN. For them, chatgpts are just another online gimmick that saves a bit of time vs googling things, or puts together some paperwork quicker, and thats it.
For me, I can see potential beyond but are largely unmoved by it. The price to pay, in fucking up our environment, losing skills and/or losing skills to build skills, making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight, seems much more like devolution and net loss. Extremely few winners and big bunch of losers. Very happy to be wrong here of course, but only time will tell and neither you nor me know for sure.
How can it be at the same time "a better search" and also "making large swaths of population unemployed with no replacement in sight" ?
Because it’s so powerful and versatile. The other day my wife took a picture of our living room and chathgpt picked out the perfect rug. That’s both a better search and avoided, say, an interior decorator. In that scenario it’s kinda both.
But only a small part of AI applications are that search-like. I mean we could even argue if this is still only search, but that's semantics and boring. But even if we would, there are a lot more applications than pure search. So the GP's original claim that it's just an improved form of something that doesn't put people out of a job, and also puts large amounts of people out of a job, doesn't make sense. Framing tax advise as "yeah it's just a better way to search tax codes" is in the same boat. It's such a massive improvement of both searching and synthesizing that it's a bit weird to call it that. Like saying a 2026 car is just an improvement of a Model T.
The TAM of electricity is 99.999% of humanity, yet there was 82 years between Alessandro Volta's Voltaic Pile experiments and the first electrical grid in the world, Pearl Street Station, New York City.
A farmer may have seen an LLM answering their questions about how to make a less dry chicken sandwich, but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester. There is not a lot of work in this space right now, because programming and math are infinitely more verifiable, and the capabilities of never models would probably invalidate any usecases, but if the model progress slows down, all attention will go towards making them work for any aspect of production.
Fair points (and I appreciate very much that they read like a human wrote them). As a counter point - and I know it's a weak one - a few years ago people were telling me that crypto was going to replace currency, and soon every person on the planet would be using it for every transaction. Many people believe that will still happen, but I don't think many serious people do.
I want to believe there is big bucks in this technology - my employer is tied up in it and so is my compensation. I just find it personally very unremarkable in a way that I never did with phones or the internet. When I got my first phone, or first started using Dogpile for research - I saw immediate value, and would have paid big bucks to keep it in my life. AI has had a few years and a huge amount of investment (time and money) and if it disappeared overnight I wouldn't pay $10 to get it back. I keep trying it, there's just something missing in my brain where it should be clicking for me :(
Nitpick or two. Holborn in London was a little earlier. Also neither was really a grid. That took another ~45 years. Maybe that's better for your argument - but I'm not quite sure that the analogy fully holds - as it's a different class of infrastructure problem.
It took the better part of a century for people to go from “hey look a steam engine” to “why don’t we put it on wheels?”.
Electricity took about half that time, 50 years, to go from “hey look a motor” to “why don’t we put them everywhere and build power grids?”
TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.
The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.
Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.
that's a lot of opinion without much reasoning/support
even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
"If we talk about just LLMs"
In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.
For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.
"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"
And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.
The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.
"but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures."
So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.
And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.
agent's failures on long horizon tasks
We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that.
The question really becomes "why would we want that?". The main reason you'd want an AI that can focus on a task forever is to completely remove the human from the loop. That's something we should be cautious about.
Not sure about that. The nature of work changes if you have some[one|thing] that can work on it continuously forever. The goal of using AI shouldn't be to do the things a person does; it should be to do the things a person would be able to do if they had (practically) unlimited time.
This is one of the inflection points around working with AI. When your thinking shifts from "AI does what the person used to do" to "AI does something different that leads to the same outcome as before, but with all that cool stuff I'd love to have the time for", then the equation changes. For example, I will never write another app that doesn't have 100% test coverage again. I stress- and soak-test everything these days. That's changing how I write code - I need to write things in ways that have deterministic harnesses for things mutable state outside of my immediate control (like random numbers or datetimes or state loaded from a save) so that I can task AI with building a fuzzer that does tens of thousands of random tests on every push to see if anything broke. I couldn't do that in the past because it was always effort that a client wouldn't get enough value from to pay me to do it. I can do those things now. It's ace.
(Everywhere I put 'I' you can replace with 'AI of the Week')
2 hours... of agent work, usually for the same output the average worker has to use much more time
Throw understanding images in there and it becomes less true in my experience. Sure they shit out code and search text well, but one infographic and they circle trying to rasterize it.
> LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all.
I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
It's also at the same time downplaying just how valuable "nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers" could be, just like computers did for us "highly motivated expert knowledge workers" in the first place. Or computers isn't a "foundational technology" either?
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
> I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.
Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable. If you were a problem solver and entrepreneur you could go and apply those on small scale, get profits, reinvest, set up a flywheel, build a fortune on the top of those, there were a lot of low hanging fruit due to the fact that the foundation was laid out, a break-even period of James Watt steam engine was like 2-3 years I believe until everyone saw it and margins flattened. Can you do that with LLMs? It doesn't look that way.
> We are not people who write newspapers we are people who are directly involved in application of the technology, we posses a higher level of insight.
Cool, you're still a person who share their thoughts, just like the people who had similar reactions to when computers and the internet first came around. So many people were railing against the internet with "You'll never make payments over the internet", "it's too slow" and whatever. To the surprise of none of us nerds, the internet eventually ate the whole world and now large swaths of the population can't imagine life without it, for better or worse.
> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.
You're comparing the reliability of huge ecosystems after they've gone mainstream, after decades, with something that is a couple of years old, hardly a fair comparison. Instead, compare where LLMs are today with the first years of computers, the internet and all that, and maybe you'll gain a new perspective on where LLMs are? None of those things were reliable initially and in many cases, involved actual human deaths before safety actually caught up.
Even when I got started with using the internet, which isn't that long time ago but around the modem-era, things were not so reliable or simple as they are today.
Computers were made and automated lots of work, even though it was still us operating those computers and making and running those automations. But eventually computers took over and running so much of the world.
Now LLMs are automating the computers themselves. This is a whole new layer that we never had before, not in this amount or with this much availability. It is not "not foundational".
> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes
Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.
> there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities
Yes, but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.
Btw I meant bigger and bigger amount of data of extracted reasoning chains when you go deeper and generate more and more of them in your attempt to describe the universe, the amount of permutations explodes. And it seems LLMs can't workaround that because they don't build world model inside so they can't deduct it from pre-built world/object model, they must memorize it and look it up later.
The thing that would change it a lot is that people would start trading away their GPUs, because some people would get vastly more economic use out of them.
Also, way more centralization, with all that logic pushed to a few AI vendors
Absolutely untrue. LLM will be the automation force of everything. It will connect and orchestrate our entire society. It will be a much bigger impact that any other revolution in the past. Our lives will be unrecognizable in 10 years from now.
In 10 years from now we will have another AI winter until a new thing arrives that pushes further.
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.
> Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
The more I use Fable the more impressed I am with it. I am still learning how to use it, same with gpt-5.6-sol. I don't think the model has changed much, but both models have gotten smarter in leaps and bounds as I've improved the documentation, context, how I provide work to them and how I specify success.
(And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.)
I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.
>I am still learning how to use it
I find it interesting that we are still talking in terms of modifying our behaviour to accommodate the tools. Surely the point of LLMs is not to "learn how to use it" but as an extension of our own unique capabilities - the most personalised tool in all of history.
The point of any tool is to learn how to use it best. That's the difference between slicing off your arm, or building a chair.
LLMs don't read minds. There's always a chasm between you (your ideas) and them becoming reality. Exactly how people cross that chasm is all the rage right now, and there are a million ways to do it - but just expecting the LLM to pull details out of a few words isn't going to produce anything decent.
You're gonna need both to be able to work with it effectively though, just like working with your hands and wood isn't the same as working with abstract architectures via characters and words on a screen, like we've done since the beginning of programming with English language rather than just numbers and formulations, like how it was in the beginning.
Going further, even programming languages "asks" that you change the way you work to make the most use of them. A Clojure developer has a very different development process than a Rust developer, and they're both efficient, right and correct in their ecosystem, but the experience differs vastly and Clojure for example would change you to fit itself, rather than the opposite.
I think I would actually characterize it as a mutual change - obviously the model doesn't change as far as I can tell, but changing the harness and context changes its behavior so wildly that it might as well. Bit of a pas de deux - I learn, I change the context to teach it, it teaches me in turn, rinse and repeat.
I finished reading it recently, too. I thought it was quirky, delightful, and obviously exaggerated for entertainment and contemplation purposes. I've recommended it to a bunch of people, too!
It triggered one of my favorite weird activities: after reading a book that I fully enjoyed and feel was completely "worth it," I give myself a few days to float on that happy feeling. Then, I go look at specifically only one and two star reviews. And laugh. Man, some people hated that book!
Note that otherwise, as a rule, I basically never read reviews of entertainment, restaurants, hotels and similar before nor after. I'm just not interested.
Haven't read that one yet, but his Children of Time series is sooo good.
Yes, that book is a stark reminder (or prediction).
I couldn't believe it when the "real" news headline was reported - destructively scanning books.
I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
Down the pipe, I think it's medium likely we'll start destructively scanning humans. Wild stuff, honestly.
My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
> not much have changed.
So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.
I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.
No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.
In the limited pockets of society you experience directly. How much has changed in the relationship between the West and Asia, the economic inequalities globally, or even in the West, etc... if you look at macro, everything moves according to laws that have little to do with the even distribution of technology and a lot to do with the decision makers that get to pick how that distribution takes place.
Just because something doesn't impact geopolitics doesn't mean it isn't important
That's not what I'm saying, and I don't know where you inferred that from. I'm saying that tech has changed the world in the way we experience it, for sure, but it has been driven by political choices, more that drive political choices itself if we look at the bigger picture.
Isn't that exactly one of the interesting tensions here?
You original point is that at a macro level it's driven by the elite decision makers not technology. I think the point you are perhaps missing is how much of that is constrained by the distribution of power and how technology can change that distribution.
I think there is no doubt that access to the internet and information ( and propaganda ) , and self-organised mass communication has had an impact - that's why countries switch off the internet when trying to suppress an uprising for example.
A lot of previously stable countries are starting to feel 'ungovernable' in the sense that's it's increasingly difficult for the established order to create and maintain it's preferred narrative.
If you look back in history at the last big information revolution - the printing press - the consensus is that it played a significant role in things like the French or American revolution or the breaking the power of centralised religion.
And sure those in power are scrambling to put the genie back in the bottle, and they may succeed - but that just illustrates the potential transformative power.
> Turned out: not much have changed.
I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
Most people still go to work every day, inequality still exists, as does famine, disease, wars…
Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.
Life in Asia and Africa has changed pretty dramatically, and improvements are accelerating. Yeah, we're not in utopia yet, but more people than ever live comfortable, safe lives. "Business at the speed of light" has become a reality, and we're still getting to grips with it. We dealt with a global pandemic with an efficiency never seen before - had it happened in the previous century, we would have probably seen "black death" levels of casualties.
Issues like inequality and conflict are mostly rooted in the human psyche more than the human condition, so they will continue to be there probably forever; but we're getting better.
The fertility rate in China is 1.
The fertility rate where I live is 1.21.
1 in 5 adult women where I live are on prescription anti-depressant medication.
For comparison - the fertility rate under Stalin - the uber evil bad guy as we all know was between 3 and 4.5.
fertility is NOT a measure of happiness
Well, population explosions tend to happen in hellholes and sensible declines happen in civilized society. The term happiness of course isn't something you can measure that easily, though.
Name one species that is happy whilst rapidly going extinct.
A species isn't a thing that can be happy or not.
Also the idea of a replacement rate of 1 equals rapidly going extinct is mathematically illiterate. Exponentials work both ways - in growth and decay - ie let's say the population halves every generation ~ 25 years - it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero - as half of half is a smaller absolute reduction each time.
> it would take nearly 1000 years to reach near zero
Depending on distribution, the rate might accelerate as it becomes difficult to find viable partners. You'd also experience civilisation collapse at a much earlier stage, as we've seen how COVID affected supply chains and created a new push for regional independence and de-globalisation.
I don't think I can do any better than you by asking the most advanced LLM to be as pedantic as possible whilst not addressing anything actually being said.
Congratulations, I suppose?
Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff? If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
You seem to equate birth rate with happiness, but ignore efficacy and availability of modern contraception.
> Do you think average human cares about "our species is going extinct" stuff?
Yes.
> If not, why couldn't they be happy at the same time?
The same reason you can't be happy if I stick a fork in your eyeball.
You'll get back to a similar 'happiness' baseline after a while but we can all agree you would've been better off with 2 eyeballs. If you go 'well, akshually' as you are doing now, I'll stick a second fork in your remaining eyeball.
If you mind me sticking forks in your eyeballs, you should also mind society that makes people not have children.
Whatever 'well, akshually' you invent - it's deeply unconvincing.
> Most people still go to work every day..
And trees and mountains and animals still exist...
Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
> Most people still go to work every day,
Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
Society wise yes, but if you had an office job, you essentially take inbound mail and transfrom it into outbound mail. That has been possible to do from home in the 80s. If you work in a large corporation, you also don't talk to people directly, you call them. That's possible from home too.
Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
Everyone working in an office (maintenance excepcted) could work from home right now. The fact so few of us do, and that so many companies (read "people who are invested in urban office space") force employees to work from offices.
I honestly still see some benefit from working together, quick meetings over lunch and the psychological effects of leaving work. Needing to physically leave your workplace helps your brain leave work at work.
I was thinking of something similar.
Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.
Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.
Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).
> Turned out: not much have changed Changed a lot, I am getting to know what a random person living some where in the world think about what change it has brought
> What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.
I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.
Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.
Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.
If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative. Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't). I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.
It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.
The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.
If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.
Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself. While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects. (And of course training/model optimisations)
Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption.
Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
I think personalized suriveillance and manipulation (thought control, manipulating people through filtering of content they receive) on a level any dictator would drool over can be gotten for a fraction of 1 GPU per person.
8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts
current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts
But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
So demand quadruples if they are always on, and doubles if they are on 1/3 of the time. Either way, too much.
Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested.
The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.
Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
It was very much both.
It's a story writing competition...
Yeah, but I'm not going to write a short story about the Butlerian Jihad's inquisitors chasing down everyone who owns a GPU for this competition.
Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.
To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.
Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.
So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.
But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.
The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
Quite an interesting selection committee:
Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.
If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double.
The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.
A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then):
((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.
AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.
500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.
> If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person...
Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.
So how is it different from now, you can name any industry for example
OK, here are a few industries: Food. Construction. Power. Logistics.
“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”
I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.
But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.
I mean, why would we wait til then? AMD is buying a company that put LLama 3.1 7b(or something close) on silicon, and can give you 15k t/s, Qwen just released Qwen 3.8 Next that seperates the intelligence from the database, so the intelligence is 6b and the rest can be done on CPU. You can put that 6b on the AMD silicon, and then use another accelerator to speed up the database if you need fast PP, and you are now much faster than the B300 after optimizations such as caching the Prompt once, and keeping it around, and many others.
Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.
If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
> Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose
Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist.
> If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
You appear to think in absolute terms. I am guessing you are very young.
I said SOTA not 100%. And that's not thinking in absolute terms.
SynthID is designed in a way that makes it virtually impossible to scrub over longer texts. It's harder for text than it is for images.
Pangram is very accurate
It really isn't and it's sad seeing so many people say it so confidently on this site. It only detects plain / basic prompted stuff. "write me an essay on x", sure. The moment you prompt it differently, it stops working. Add "output should be STE100 compliant" or something to your prompts and detection goes away. Fine-tune any local llm on real human prose, and detection goes away. Edit 2-3 characters (emdashes, lists, etc) and detection goes away.
And that's for just basic detection. There have been plenty of examples of 100% human written content (either old, or unpublished) that gets falsely flagged as AI.
And these are just technical aspects. The main issue is that pangram and other solutions are being used to summarily judge students work, and that is orders of magnitude more fucked up. Accusing someone of cheating can have devastating effects on their education/career/etc. and they're doing it with snake-oil closed boxes, at scale. We really really shouldn't support this, especially here on a technical site.
No it isn't. I've put human written material in there (my own unpublished material) and it says 90%+ AI. Then I put some AI material in and it said 30% chance of AI.
I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
Can you share your human piece that got flagged? And the AI piece that didn't? (Or snippets?) I've found pangram to be very accurate, so I'm curious.
Everything has false positives or negatives. 2 examples doesn't tell anything about how good or bad it is.
They want to give you a GPU justified for the AI revolution but, they discourage the usage of LLMs lol
Looking at the trends, local AI is the future, smaller models are getting faster and high demands always leads to oversupply if you've got resources, just look at all the AI data-centers, If small models go mainstream GPU's and data-centers will become dirt-cheap.
Literally just write “the young lady’s illustrated primer” again. Stephenson already called it.
Or : "The young GPU's illustrated human primer"
They already have, unfortunately most devs still don't target GPU and NPUs available on their mobile devices.
Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.
The premise of the story is silly. If AI gets cheaper and faster, then it certainly will get smarter (just not in the raw sense) as harnesses, tool access, memory, etc. improve. You can’t hold intelligence as a fixed variable but then imply other aspects of it improve
Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.
That's pessimistic. In 2040 we have a cluster of b300 equals or more in our phone.
> fonts haven't loaded, reload the page
oh bugger off
Anyone else sing that in there head as, "Where in the world, GPU world".
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
I think the point of stories like these is to accept that the world is too complex to fit into a story but we can try to fit a part of it anyway and we might learn something from it or at least get an interesting experience.
Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)
GPU per person or models working on less computing power
What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?
Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
> I wonder if they will accept a play.
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
One interesting formulation is that humans are the sex organs of AI.
It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
> What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365
One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
> What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?
Did you even read the prompt
Its a sci-fi story prompt. Do non tech bros not understand the concept of fiction?
And? Virtually everyone in the world has internet
Good argument going here but here is what internet tells me about 'facts':
Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around.
In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
with a good enough LLM you can greatly increase the capability to build a functioning well (and other basic infrastructures) in remote and undeveloped areas without great technical knowledge, they are very good as assistants for practical tasks where you can give feedback step by step on what is happening
Will any of the data submitted be used in training? We are all given the prompt and you will get a few thousand (maybe tens of thousands of submissions). Seems like a great source of training material.
Dystopian.
I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave.
That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI.
Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.
We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.
They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.
They're not going to create anything.
Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).
If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is.
The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course.
And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least.
You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid.
I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.
This may be the most HN comment I've ever read.
What a fantastically bleak world view.
The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back
There have been studied and experiments with UBI which contradict what you say.