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by enasterosophes 614 days ago
People were already talking about Big Data in the 90s. If you send this idea back in time to 2005, people wouldn't be stunned by the revolutionary innovations it would unlock. They would say, "oh, someone else on the Big Data hype train."
2 comments
kridsdale3 614 days ago
As much as we can plot out and understand exponential growth curves, I'm pretty sure people in 2005 would still be shocked to hear about GPUs with hundreds of gigs of RAM, with bandwidths around a Tbps, and not just one per server, but hundreds of industrial greenhouse sized buildings with a million of them, each, consuming entire nuclear plants of generation output.

Also you could blow their minds with a 24 TB HDD. It's as nuts as telling a 2024 person about a 1 PB HDD in a regular PC.

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jcgrillo 614 days ago
2005 was when Kurzweil was trying to tell everyone we'd have artificial hemoglobin nanobots that would allow us to swim around under water for an hour on one breath, based on the exponential growth of.. who knows what.

Also in 2005 IIRC we were still expecting to eventually hit 10GHz/core, but my recollection is hazy that dream might have been quashed by then. The point is, the wild overestimates of techno-progress aren't anything new.

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jodrellblank 614 days ago
Here's 9Ghz: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSUlvaE6N1U
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jcgrillo 614 days ago
That's impressive! Doesn't run for very long at that rate haha
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dimatura 614 days ago
I don't know, when I was in grad school back in the early 2010s I definitely agreed "big data" in computer vision was important and probably stated that in the intro of some paper. My advisor at the time was very vocal about this. But I was still surprised at how well GPT/CLIP/diffusion/etc started working in the last few years.
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enasterosophes 614 days ago
I didn't claim Big Data wasn't important. But looking at the opening paragraph of the article, I just don't think it was a revolutionary idea in 2005.

We knew big data was important. There was a lot of hype around how big data will become more and more important in the future.

An email from someone in 2024 saying "hey big data is important!" wouldn't have led to innovations which weren't already happening. It would have been seen as cringe, like is this the best the future can come up with?

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