Comment by keyle
10 hours ago
I'd help build Gas City and Gas State, and Gas Country if that would mean we actually would solve the things AI promised to solve. All sickness, famine, wealth ...
The problem is, we're just fidgeting yolo-fizzbuzz ad nauseam.
The return on investment at the moment is probably one of the worst in the history of human investments.
AI does improve over time, still today, but we're going to run out of planet before we get there...
Are you saying that people can't work out what to code using these? Or that code is not a worthy subject to use AI for? 'cause I got news for you... 1. Improving coding improved reasoning in the models. Having a verifiable answer that is not a single thing is a good training test. 2. Software has been used for fairly serious things. We used to have skyscrapers of people doing manual math. Now we have campuses of people doing manual code. You might argue that nobody would trust AI to write code when it matters. History tells us that if that is ever true, it will pass. 3. We are not going to run out of planet. It just feels to folks that there is not enough planet for their dreams and we get population panic, energy panic etc. There is a huge fusion reactor conveniently holding us in it's gravity well and spewing out many orders of magnitude more energy than we can currently use. Chill.
I think at Gas Country levels we will need better networking systems. Maybe that backbone Nvidia just built....
As of yet, the AI models doing important work are still pretty specialized. I'd be happy to pitch in to run something like an open source version of alpha-fold, but I'm not aware of any such projects.
I have trouble seeing LLMs making meaningful progress on those frontiers without reaching ASI, but I'd be happy to be wrong.
I think part of the problem/difference is that all "important work" needs to be auditable and understood by humans. We need to be able to fix bugs, and not just roll the dice and hoping that a lack of symptoms means everything is cured.
AI can't even find a cure for the common cold.
The Wright brothers are idiots, if it were me I'd have made a supersonic jet from the get go and not waste my time mucking around with prototypes.
The prototype phase meant data centers are now measured in MW instead of TFLOPS.
At a time where we were desperate to reduce emissions, data centers now consume around 20% of the energy consumed by the entire aviation sector, with consumption is rising at 15% YoY.
Never mind the water required to cool them, or the energy and resources required to build them, the capital allocation, and the opportunity cost of not allocating all of that to something else.
And this is, your words, the prototype phase.
The computing power in a crappy cheap modern phone used to fill up a warehouse and cost a ton of energy, relatively. Moore's law might not remain steadfast, but if history is any indication, we'll find a way to make the technology more efficient.
So, yes, prototypes often use more energy than the final product. That doesn't mean we shouldn't sustainable build datacenters, but that's conflating issues.
the Wright brothers sold me a subscription to a supersonic jet and I've got a bundle of matchsticks and some canvas.
On the other hand, flight is ubiquitous and has changed everything.
We were promised supersonic jets today or very soon though and our economies have been held hostage waiting for that promise.
The passive voice is doing a lot of work in your sentence.
6 replies →
The first recorded supersonic flight was in 1947.
1 reply →