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).<p>Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, <i>all the content is in the document</i>, 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? <i>fonts!?</i>) 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 <i>that</i> focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.<p>(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
100k prize announcement for a competition right up a HN writer's alley and the top discussion on it is how the announcement page doesn't load correctly on a browser with half the features disabled. We are truly a special group :D.
I have a fully functional, updated Chrome derivative with all the features enabled, and they went out of their way to dynamically load a<p><pre><code> Update your browser to access this website
</code></pre>
message as the only visible content rather than test features (which they're clearly doing to GP, so how much work would it be to properly use that feature testing as the main tool for compatability checking) or just letting the browser try to load it -- displaying one of those big-tech "update your browser now" nag messages if they really feel the need to be annoying.
It’s currently at +39. I did <i>not</i> expect that! I expected it to settle at the bottom like something that settles at the bottom—I dunno, detritus, lees, Titanic, something like that.<p>Still, I’ll take the opportunity to advocate for turning off fonts. Firefox: Settings → Fonts → Advanced settings → <i>Allow pages to choose their own fonts, instead of your selections above</i>. I’ve been using the web so for 6½ years and it makes it <i>so</i> much better.
It probably just literally doesn't work for most people. If you click through, see a broken page, and see that the top comment thinks the way in which it's broken is interesting, that'll probably be more interesting to engage with than the contents of the page.
+40
I hate websites that do stupid stuff. My latest pet peeve is Qwen's blog, when I pinch to zoom, to be able to read their tiny graphs, there is a black bar that progressively covers the entire page.
I circumvented it with this one-liner (credit to DSV4 0731, who kindly read the minified scripts for me). I got it to work by injecting it at the console after a refresh, and before the scripts finished loading (there's probably more robust ways but I'm lazy and this does work).<p><pre><code> FontFace.prototype.load = function() { return Promise.resolve(this); };
</code></pre>
Anyway; those are my two cents.
>Please don't complain about tangential annoyances—e.g. article or website formats, name collisions, or back-button breakage. They're too common to be interesting.<p>This is the guideline that people find, by far, the hardest not to break. @dang or whoever - has anyone ever considered adding some kind of 'meta' discussion area to each topic? This would provide a place for people to commiserate / troubleshoot without diluting the main discussion? As we saw here, the discussions can sometimes be plenty productive (e.g. the author seeing and reacting to the criticism, paywall workarounds, etc.), it's just not what people interested in the actual subject want to read. And conversely, if it was moved into a special meta annex, people with a problem or a gripe would know right where to look.
The only reason I commented this was because the specific breakage was novel. And it’s rare for this specific type of comment to rank highly. Apparently this one is unusually interesting to others, or something? Beats me.
Sure, the specifics of this issue are intriguing on their own terms to the website nerds, but “there exists a problem with display of the website” surely rates as a tangential annoyance.<p>It’s unrealistic to imagine that we could ever fully moderate these meta comments away because there’s always going to be new problems and corresponding urges to discuss them. Nor do I think we really want to, when it comes down to it. They’re often useful, or at least cathartic.<p>…but. They DO make for dreadful reading if you actually came to read about the article itself. Thus my idea to add a wiki-style meta section. Then you get best of both worlds.
I think you deserve a rule bending or two every once in a while, as a fine HN citizen in good standing. They're not even linked prominently, so the fact that they even exist for a site that doesn't justify moderation actions feels a bit like Eternal September Keyfabe
Sorry, we’ll fix!
This is what happens when the world has a gpu per person
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?<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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 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.<p>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.)
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."<p>Predicting the future is hard.
I don't think you've said anything different than the person you're responding to. The difference primarily seems to be whether you think AI is transformative vs simply being another tool (which is really just a matter of perspective).<p>If you're not an expert software engineer, it's transformative. If you are, it's just another tool.
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 <i>electricity</i> 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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.
> I don't know if anybody consuming it really wants to.<p>You don't know of people who ask LLMs questions? Or just chat with it for fun and to learn?<p>Maybe your electrician isn't interested. A pharmacist and a nurse I talk to are. Virtually everybody I've talked to uses it to some degree or another. I think it'll soon replace Alexa/Siri for most people, as well as google search.<p>That's pretty far from nobody.
I think the first parent post all this conversation originated from, pointed that LLMs are not groundbreaking inventions.<p>If people use it to replace voice assistants or search engines, you can see how this new invention is not really adding anything you already hadn't.<p>AIs in general are very useful, but apart from the campaign they did to change everything's name into AI (also well known algorithms and "old" machine learning), if you look at all the possible applications, LLMs are possibly the least useful of them.<p>Especially if you take into account how much money they spent, and how much effort they put to shove it in your throat.<p>If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it. If it is convenient, people will use it in a natural way.
> If a technology is convenient for people, you shouldn't need to insist to make people use it.<p>This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid. Because of the enormous cost, it can't be left to "hope they'll find it useful," and has to be pushed like crazy, or we're going to be left with a train system with no goods or passengers, and no path into the future.<p>Personally, having AI as an intelligence I can call like it's a library from apps I build... and to help build those apps... I feel that the future is as bright as the sun. I've always believed in software, but I feel like a chef that's just discovered salt and butter.<p>I don't know what it means for the world stage, but I believe that software is the highest art, and it's just had an incalculably massive buff. As an artist, I am stoked. The possibilities for creation of good things are limitless, and if you can't see that, I can't help you.<p>However, I wouldn't necessarily invest in AI companies. I don't know how this all fits into the rest of the world, except that I believe in my own ability to make products, same as I ever did, but now with AI.
> This is like the railroads, and the tracks have been laid.<p>Except that for railroads I don't need people to convince me about how/when/why it can be useful.<p>Railroads came out to solve an issue we had (and then it evolved).
LLMs are not giving us any new solution, just different speed (better) and quality (worse) to solve things we co&ld already solve.<p>It's basically the same concept as fast fashion.
Worse quality, more speed, possibly more economic.
You can change your wardrobe possibly every year, but you will never wear good quality clothes.<p>Now you can write code at impressive speed, but it is worse in quality, and you need to review it more often than "normal" code.<p>AI code should always be fully reviewed and put into the correct context to make it useful, otherwise long term problems will void short term benefits
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.<p>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.<p>> And remember that this is the least powerful that it will ever be.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.)<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.
>but he hasn't seen a specifically designed and tested harness that autonomously manages a crop harvester.<p>Eh, I'd say there is a lot more stuff like this being developed these days. Autonomous seeders are becoming more common and (semi-)autonomous tractors are in use.<p>I'd say a very large part of the in field work can be done now, and is using enhancements like vision models to identify potential problems that crop up to notify humans. It's when the machines have to interact in tight busy spaces or with non-farm traffic that control is handed over to a human.
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.
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.<p>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 :(
> 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.<p>As you say, that is a weak counter point. I do get what you're saying, but crypto flaws were built in from the start:<p>- Deflationary currency isn't going to be spent, it is going to be hoarded, if it would have any value at all. The design was self defeating from the very start.<p>- Technical limits of PoW. Obvious right from the start, which led to the block wars. PoS "solves" that but with other costs. And it still doesn't solve the first point.<p>Despite these, crypto did get adopted, just not in any way that crypto maximalists said it would. It got hoarded, as expected.<p>But the real test is: If crypto disappeared tomorrow, would the world notice or really care? I would argue, apart from people losing money, most of the world wouldn't even notice it was gone.<p>There is no way you could say that for LLMs.
We're still in early stages, but in just 2 years AI has presented higher education with the single most disruptive change in decades. Now a computer can do your entire coursework for you, is available to converse on a broad range of topics, and can accomplish unaided huge open-ended problems.<p>> most other revolutionary technologies found their game changing, broad reaching applications by this point.<p>I think your timeline expectations are miscalibrated. The steam engine goes back centuries. Even in the mid 1700s to 1800s, advances in engine design were decades apart, and the logistics of building and deploying steam engines mandated an uptake in years, even in perfectly-fitted applications.<p>Like these applications where there were existing manual-labor solutions that not only fought the technology but were still competitive, AI and LLMs weren't born in a vacuum. In order to revolutionize, it must displace, and people are rightly finding ways to do their jobs in more productive ways that moderate adoption speed.<p>Can you name some other technologies that have exploded from 0 to billions of users in just 3 years?
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.
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?”.<p>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?”<p>TV took 25 years from patent to mass market adoption.<p>The internet, 15 years from lynx to iPhone.<p>Google published the transformer architecture in 2017. We are currently at “oh hey a talking computer”.
I'm with you on this. I remember when the Internet became a thing, how revolutionary it was to all areas of my life.<p>This is comparable.<p>While I dislike the bonkers valuations, and "were building Agi so it tells us how to be profitable" is onion worthy statement LLMs are an absolutely revolutionary technology.<p>Even with all the hallucinations.<p>Imagine telling someone 15 years ago Internet/Google is useless because people sometimes do not tell the truth online... It's like that.<p>I also hate the fact AI is being used as justification to grab all compute in the world and lock it up in one country's datacenters.<p>I hope this endeavour fails, but sadly being realistic I have to admit I think the so called "AI bubble" will not pop. Instead the companies will be bailed out with printed money.<p>I recently looked up there are approximately $20Trillion in circulation. Even if they print extra $2T it will dilute existing money supply by 10%. So everyone that uses USD as a currency will pay for the datacenter build out wether we want it or not.<p>All the compute will be slurped from the market for this and companies like nvidia that get used to 50bln deals will never go back to making consumer stuff.<p>I never thought I'll live to see the PC revolution reverse, but that is what seems to be happening.
I strongly agree. I cannot understand how anyone could seriously use this technology and come away thinking it's mostly useless. I suspect there is a LOT of bias baked into their opinion.
<i>agent's failures on long horizon tasks</i><p>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.<p>The question really becomes "<i>why would we want that?</i>". 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.
My codex tasks regularly cross 8 hours, and I'm only using Sol High. It's not unusual for tasks to span much longer. It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete.<p>Anthropic and OpenAI are currently obsessed with getting humans out of the training and improvement loops. It's going to happen very soon and when it does I think we see staggering improvements in a very short space of time. Basically, the Singularity.
Are you breaking up your tasks and spawning new sessions for each, or are you just yoloing and letting it auto compact when it blows the context many times on such a long running task?
> It just requires instructions to continue working until the spec is complete<p>Try putting an LLM agent in a deterministic workflow without humans in the loop. My experience with this is not encouraging. Getting it to work requires sprinkling some context magic and hoping and praying the LLM does the right thing. More astrology or religion and less science. Great for use cases with humans-in-the-loop, but less than impressive when you need determinism and reliable operation.
<p><pre><code> 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.</code></pre>
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.<p>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.<p>(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
that's a lot of opinion without much reasoning/support<p>even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
> LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>> Computers, the Internet, Steam engine, Rail roads are much more reliable.<p>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.<p>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.
"If we talk about just LLMs"<p>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.<p>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.<p>"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"<p>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.<p>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.<p>"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."<p>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.<p>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.
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.
> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes<p>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<p>Yes, but LLMs are not animals, animals learn from experience and LLMs don't.<p>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.
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.<p>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".
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 <i>literally literature calculus</i> but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.
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.
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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.<p>> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>[1] - <a href="https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-model" rel="nofollow">https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...</a>
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.<p>(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.)<p>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 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!<p>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!<p>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.<p>I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
I'm not sure what else might happen, but at a minimum the Babel Fish will finally be real, even without internet.
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".<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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I was thinking of something similar.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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…<p>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.<p>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.
> Most people still go to work every day..<p>And trees and mountains and animals still exist...<p>Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
> Most people still go to work every day,<p>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.<p>Until the industrial revolution, every work was home work.
> 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.<p>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.<p>Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.<p>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.<p>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.
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Do submissions need to be in English? If so, that'll prevent a huge chunk of us from participating.
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.
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.<p>Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
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)
Right, if everyone in the world has a GPU we would have solved so many problems with power generation and... I'm not going to do the math but I think we'd be mining asteroids too? I'd probably use it as a bookend at the point.
8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts<p>current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts<p>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.
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.
Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested.<p>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.
One of the amazing things is that when every has one GPU, they will actually have 1k-10k agents at their disposal.<p>LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.<p>This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.
<i>LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.</i><p>Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
From Dune by Frank Herbert. See "Butlerian Jihad" [1]<p>[1] <a href="https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad" rel="nofollow">https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad</a>
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's a story writing competition...
Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
Quite an interesting selection committee:<p><pre><code> Neal Stephenson
Gwern Branwen
Matt Huang</code></pre>
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.<p>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.<p>Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.<p>So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.<p>But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.<p>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?
> 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.
All the world has access to forks/chopsticks/spoons, but every person has a preference that might be N+1 or 0.<p>Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed?<p>It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.
I don't see how an even playing field can exist given the Power law
If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double.<p>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):<p>((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt.<p>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...<p>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.
They want to give you a GPU justified for the AI revolution but, they discourage the usage of LLMs lol
After the first couple paragraphs I thought this was going to be a parody of One Laptop Per Child. Sadly it wasn't.
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
“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”
> 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.<p>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.<p>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<p>Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist.<p>> If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.<p>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 <i>really</i> 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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
I’ve never actually seen someone give an example of what they say pangram get wrong, so please go ahead and share.
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.
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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.
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.<p>Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
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.
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.
> What if the world had one GPU per person?<p>It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.
They already have, unfortunately most devs still don't target GPU and NPUs available on their mobile devices.<p>Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.
That's pessimistic. In 2040 we have a cluster of b300 equals or more in our phone.
we can't do this with food. why would we be able to do this with GPUs
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.<p>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.<p>(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a <i>very</i> 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 <i>annual income</i>: <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_the_United_States" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_...</a> )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing<p>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).
Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous.<p>How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative:<p>"AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.<p>And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
Anyone else sing that in there head as, "Where in the world, GPU world".
I haven't got 1000 words in me, but here's what I think might make for a plausible story. Maybe a little too Matrix adjacent!:<p>The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence.<p>The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners.<p>New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model.<p>We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous.<p>The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress.<p>To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations.<p>But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt.<p>We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases.<p>But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'.<p>A new religion was started, and chaos followed.
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.<p>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.<p>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.)
The contest is sponsored (<a href="https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules" rel="nofollow">https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules</a>) by a crypto bro firm that also invested in FTX:<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm...</a><p>And by an AI company:<p><a href="https://guardianangel-ai.com/" rel="nofollow">https://guardianangel-ai.com/</a><p>This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.<p>What would this world be like?<p>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?"<p>What <i>great questions!</i><p>These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!<p>Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!<p>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...<p>That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...<p>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...<p>Which might be interesting to look at for <i>comparison</i> purposes...<p>You know, "for good or for evil, in the <i>superlative degree of comparison only</i>...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
GPU per person or models working on less computing power
> fonts haven't loaded, reload the page<p>oh bugger off
We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
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
I'd write to this. It could be really fun...<p>But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.
Weird things like this website are top signals. “A chicken in every pot.”
It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!
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.
We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM <i>that</i> much more valuable...)<p>Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.
We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>They're not going to create anything.<p>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).<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
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Dystopian.
> 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<p>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?<p>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':<p>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.<p>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
What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?
More or less every person owns a GPU (mobile) already. They use it for rendering your stupid website. In addition, many have desktop GPUs. Which they use for gaming.<p>Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.
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.