Comment by soulofmischief
11 hours ago
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.
11 hours ago
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.
Flight changed everything when it comes to warfare. But as far as individuals are concerned, the average human on the planet will take a handful of flights in their lifetime, at best, and nearly all flights that are taken are for recreation which is ultimately fungible with other forms of recreation that don't involve taking flights, and of the flights that aren't for recreation most could be replaced by things like video calls, and the vast and overwhelming majority of the goods that make up the lifeblood of the global economy are still shipped by ship, not shipped by air.
Which is to say, the commercial aviation industry could permanently collapse tomorrow and it would have only a marginal impact on most people's lives, who would just replace planes with train, car, or boat travel. The lesson here is that even if normal people experience some tangential beneficial effects from LLMs, their most enduring legacy will likely be to entrench authority and cement the existing power structures.
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.
We are perpetually just months away from software jobs being obsolete.
AGI was achieved internally at OpenAI a year ago.
Multiple companies have already re-hired staff they had fired and replaced with AI.
etc.
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The first recorded supersonic flight was in 1947.
Supersonic passenger planes failed commercially.