[KerrAvon]

There isn't a hurdle here. These problems are fundamental to the technology.

If you told me 20 years ago that you could, by connecting a nuclear power plant to a virtually infinite number of GPUs, produce a machine capable of predicting the next token in a sequence, I'dve believed you, but also would have said that it would be an astoundingly huge waste of resources to use to get to that result.

People seem to ascribe some magic here that isn't happening, because they're surprised by the results.

[dylan604]

> People seem to ascribe some magic here that isn't happening, because they're surprised by the results.

I believe this is the result of drinking the kool-aid. At this point though, I'm really confused on how AI has any jobs left to do because blockchain was going to solve all the problems.

[equestria]

I don't think it's a useful way to frame it. Model training is very compute-intensive. Generation isn't. You can run it on locally on consumer hardware. It's just not very monetizable, so we're converging on a black-box "in the cloud" approach.

If we're focusing on energy consumption, using an LLM to generate a newspaper article probably uses less energy than a living journalist would use. The morning commute alone is probably "worth" a dozen articles.

The problem is different. First, that journalist is still alive and consuming resources, just out of a job. Second, because you now have a very cheap way to generate an infinite number of articles, and there are commercial incentives to do so, the "dead internet theory" has a good chance of coming true.

[ethbr1]

A major failing in futurism is not accounting for both quality and cost scaling, especially supra-linear.

If you'd told someone with one of the first automobiles that they'd eventually be massively personally-owned, have access the majority of countries via paved road networks, and be refillable along the way, they'd have laughed at you.

And yet, that's what we've all lived in.

It happened because automobiles were massively useful.

It's difficult to imagine a scenario where basic-level cognition doesn't also scale, because a lot of the mental tasks we do every day are dumb and low-value.

[hnlmorg]

Nearly every example of futurism I’ve seen in my 40+ years of looking at future technology has been people over accounting for scaling rather than ignoring it.

For example they see a prototype and then assume in 10 years everyone will have one.

Or they look at a proof of concept and don’t realise that that last 10% of refinement actually takes 90% of the effort.

What people usually miss is that scaling is the problem, not the solution. Prototypes are easy in comparison.

[ethbr1]

The quip that stuck in my head (Kurzweil?) is that adoption is based on utility over existing practice.

Hence why cell phone took off (verse land lines) but flying cars didn't (verse ground cars).

Adding basic level creativity to automation seems like the former.

It's not going to change everything overnight, but it is going to impact everything into a new normal.