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Greed is a fabulous motivator but it can't surpass the laws of physics. This is probably why we don't have a cure for cancer or room temperature superconductors

Greed is a fabulous motivator but it can't surpass the laws of physics. This is probably why we don't have a cure for cancer or room temperature superconductors or jurassic parks. It may be so that scaling down a language model like GPT 4 is not possible on hardware systems orders of magnitude smaller than the one used by OpenAI. I'm not saying it's impossible but it's fallacious to just assume outright that it's inevitable because market forces. For all we know it could turn out that the only way to get a gpt in a pocket format is through some form of analog chips that must be individually trained that Hinton aptly described as an era of mortal computing.

alwayslikethis 4y ago
There is nothing impossible about a Jurassic park in terms of laws of physics though. It's a matter of getting the right materials to recreate dinosaurs. Same goes for cancer cures. I'm not sure if there are physical limitations preventing a room temp superconductor.
- kergonath 4y ago
  > I'm not sure if there are physical limitations preventing a room temp superconductor. Not really. We just know that it’s very uncommon at best. The limit is material dependent and we already have superconductors with more than one order of magnitude difference in their critical temperature (e.g. ~4 K vs ~40 K; YBCO, which is widely studied, is at 90 K). It is not inconceivable that we could come up with some fancy material with a critical temperature three times as high again. There are several laboratories with good money working on it.