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AI eats the world
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- 5350-uiop-1130 2y ago"[hot new thing] eats the world" (˚0˚)!!
- benatkin 2y agoTypical a16z. Also brought us The Techno-Optimist Manifesto and please vote Trump because of muh crypto. Edit: Benedict Evans no longer works for a16z. However I think it must be a reference to Why Software Is Eating the World.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- ProofHouse 2y ago'you are an expert in slide summarzing...'
- orionblastar 2y agoIf only AI were used for good and not for evil. Think of the jobs replaced with AI. Please think of the students cheating by letting AI write their papers. Please think of the high school student who creates porn using Deepfake AI of the girls in his class instant kiddie porn. We need AI to solve climate change, but the energy costs will contribute to climate change. We need a cure for cancer, and an end to COVID and other dangerous viruses, a way for a personal AI that does tasks and earns the user money for basic income or something.
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago> We need AI to solve climate change It's a chat bot. Solving climate change is way above its paygrade.
- coffeebeqn 2y agoLLMs aren’t the only game in town
- red-iron-pine 2y agobut LLMs seem to be the only one delivering. something something RNA Moderna something -- yeah, okay, in niche fields. what, specifically, is AI doing to fix climate change? outside of creating a shit-ton of carbon burning through electricity, that is.
- raverbashing 2y agoI feel it would only repeat the same things the boomers are too hard headed to understand And probably also note that the proposals of the climate-justified-vandals are too unrealistic There's nothing more nonsense than a solar-nuclear antagonism. Build more solar. Build more nuclear, preferably SMRs, and do more research on ways of making it safer and cost-effective. Fill the dry sunny areas with solar and batteries. Fill the windy areas with wind turbines and treat anyone opposing this with the same contempt as people vandalizing paintings "for the climate" Every car should be at least a hybrid, because there's nothing more clunky than plugging an engine that deals badly with varying RPM and torque directly to a variable load.
- kubb 2y agoIt already does. Ask it if trickle down economics works, or what are the benefits of economic redistribution and how it’s different from socialism. The problem is that people’s don’t use it for what it’s good for, but they try to make it code and play chess, because they can’t accept that it can’t think (yet).
- otabdeveloper4 2y ago
- Roark66 2y agoI hope this is irony. If not you could write the same with little changes about the steam engine. It is a technological advance same as every one prior to it. Those that embrace it and use it will come out on top (not without personal risks of having your own skills atrophy). Others will loose. Just like every person doing horse stables work when automobiles became widely used.
- girvo 2y agoExcept this isn't the steam engine or the internal combustion engine/the car, it's tech, and it replaces most jobs rather than just a few. If you take its future promise as true (I do not, but for sake of argument lets pretend it is as powerful as you're saying), then it's impact is on a completely different scale and ability than even industrialisation. Its silly to retreat to "no one shoes horses anymore" platitudes as if this tool isn't widly more capable (again, if we take its future promise as written) and disruptive.
- rightbyte 2y agoSo we have in the big shifts: Agriculture workers, became industry workers. (Mechanized agriculture). Industry workers, became service and white collar workers. (Automatization). I don't see a sector for white collar workers to shift to now. Even more service workers? There is room in the serf and capitalist classes though. Hopefully we end up in the later rather than former. But there is a need for political reform to open up the later I guess. 3 day work week and so on the lower the lowering pressure on wages. Progressive corp. tax? But I don't see that happening in the US.
- lucianbr 2y agoLower on the page, there are links to his "Mobile is eating the world" presentation, 2015-ish. How does this work? Is AI eating Mobile now? Is there a new world to be eaten every decade or so? Ah, wait. It's just meaningless hyperbole.
- baxtr 2y agoI don’t like the guy. But don’t you think he was right about mobile?
- lucianbr 2y agoA lot of mobile has happened. I don't think it "ate the world" - that would mean everything would be mobile now, and it is not. What's all the discussion I read on HN about rewriting everything in rust, LLMs, Postgres replacing everything, and many others? Not mobile, is what it is. It's a meaningless soundbite.
- benedictevans 2y ago1: It's the TITLE of a 100 slide presentation. It's not the only thing it said, and it's a way to think about what was happening. 2: Mobile replaced the PC as the main way people use the internet and do their day-to-day computing. The consumer Internet runs on smartphone apps, not PCs. In 2013 a lot of people didn't understand that that was happening, so it was worth saying.
- bhaney 2y ago> Is AI eating Mobile now? Yes
- rohansood15 2y agoIf you look past the hyperbole, I think there are some interesting data points in there. For example, fewer enterprises claim to have AI systems in production this year vs last year.
- throwup238 2y ago
- why_only_15 2y agoUsed to really love his stuff, but this is all pretty well-trod ground and he doesn't have much new to say.
- jumping_frog 2y agoI think the talk is meant for executives who are more cautious and want the fluff and dust to settle before they deploy resources at their companies at the next shiny thing.
- benedictevans 2y agoWell, I'm not trying to explain the state of the science and the engineering, but to work out what this means to everyone else. There are no products to analyse yet - which is part of the problem.
- seydor 2y agoTherefore, after being digested the world will have turned to ____?
- red-iron-pine 2y ago...the ending from Marshall Brain's short story, Manna
- disqard 2y agoIndeed, and after that shit turns cold, it'll be the "heat death" of the Information Universe that we called the Internet.
- interludead 2y agoTherefore, after being digested, the world will have turned to data
- smgpie 2y agoBut I do think our current path on these huge networks are far from leading us to the long-desired AGI, this is just doubling the compute as well as cost as time goes on.
- mg 2y agoThe question is how fast. I remember in the late 90s, me and some friends discovered the internet and went "Woah! Letters, books, shops, work, study, gaming ... pretty much everything will take place in this virtual realm soon!". We were right. Except for the "soon". When the first internet café opened, we started spending a lot of our time there, meeting lots of interesting people. Everything outside the internet already seemed anachronistic to us. What I didn't expect back then was that even replacing letters with email (which already worked!) would take another painstaking ... 20 years! Today, my work is already massively transformed via neural networks. Pretty much everything I do starts with an interaction with a neural network. Usually a question to an LLM. And then LLMs or other networks are involved all the way up to finishing the task. Thinking about how I worked before these large neural networks came up makes me shiver. How cumbersome. How anachronistic. But when I talk to people outside the tech sphere, most are not using LLMs or other neural networks at all. Everything humans do will be deeply transformed. Even more so than via the internet. Will it take 20 years again? Or is technological progress accelerating and this time it will take only 10 years? So far, my feeling is that it will be a bit faster, but not twice as fast. But maybe it will be even more surprising. One future I can imagine is that people don't even need to adapt. Maybe we will see software simply do all aspects of a job. One can already imagine it for driving cars or making movies. It is harder to imagine it for managing a company, for example. But who knows. LLMs are already surprisingly good at creating chains of thoughts. Maybe we'll find ourselves in an unexpected future in a few years already, where human involvement in anything is just a burden to the process.
- cryptoz 2y agoI think they are, though, just not consciously. I’m finding more and more it is rare that I find myself typing on a device and there isn’t some AI lurking in it. Email, docs, mobile keyboards, soon to be also Apple intelligence searching your photos, etc. I can’t even type a note to myself in gmail without “polish!” Popping in to tell me that I’m shit at writing a good note-to-self and it needs polishing. (Wherein it typically reforms to , “dear customer service, …”) Every Google search is using llm now right? At least I can’t figure out how to stop it from happening.
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- phito 2y agoThe only thing AI is eating is power.
- eichi 2y agoI like your words which have metaphors. Does "Power" here mean Electricity Power, Political Power or Financial Power?
- pabs3 2y agoAll of the above?
- whtsthmttrmn 2y agoSoul power.
- red-iron-pine 2y ago"AI uses the same amount of power as Bolivia per day to craft 80% accurate powerpoint slides for consultants to present to executives who are outsourcing their primary job function for 900/hr"
- Animats 2y agoThat slide deck is more questions than answers. Here's a useful question: Suppose the LLM hallucination problem is not solved in the next 10 years. What happens to the AI boom?
- benedictevans 2y agoI tried to capture this on the last slide before the conclusion - maybe all AI questions have one of two answers - "no-one knows" or "it will be the same as the last time" this is one of the "no-one knows" questions
- Animats 2y agoThe question I'm asking isn't whether hallucinations can be fixed. It's what, if they are not fixed, are the economic consequences for the industry? How necessary is it that LLMs become trustworthy? How much valuation assumes that they will?
- Sateeshm 2y agoAnd is it even fixable?
- namaria 2y agoThe "hallucinations" problem feels to me like an inherent feature. For LLMs to have interesting output the temperature needs to be higher then zero. The whole system is interesting because it is probabilistic. "Hallucinations" (hate the word btw) are to LLMs as melting is to ice. There will be no 'meltless' ice because the melting is what makes it cold and useful.
- openrisk 2y agoIt might be useful to check how linear regression, the first form of "AI" has eaten the world. Lets call its modern incarnation LLR (Large Linear Regression) for kicks. In LLR you fit a massive chunk of data, you do an interpolation and you use the result with care, or, you fit the data, you do an extrapolation and you live dangerously. So its all good fun, but how to you eat the universe with it? You might try to become the Matlab or SAS or Excel that brings Large Linear Regression to the world. Godspeed, a giant Python has already swallowed C++ and they will be coming be after you. You may try to eat all the world's data so that nobody but you can do Large Linear Regressions. Good luck with that pharaonic quest as well. Or you might try to print silicon that does LLR quickly, hoping that nobody else can master that dark art. But silicon is as plentiful as sand and keeping dark secrets dark is not easy when you want to eat the world. Thats about it. No melodrama, no medieval moats, no megazillion dollars. LLR will be everywhere and yet nobody will care. The bandwagon will move to the next big tech thing. Quantum Coin maybe? Assuming the deteriorating reality of our actual condition does not catch up with this clown circus. Because the end condition of the world being serially eaten by the tech bros is... the world being dead.
- KronisLV 2y ago> What's our AI strategy? In most cases, probably giving OpenAI a bunch of money. For whatever reason, the full stack hasn't been commoditized yet to a degree where you could self-host easily. For example, I can put the paid or free version of GitLab on my servers and get repo management, issue tracking, CI/CD, Wiki and a bunch of other stuff. It covers most use cases and works out of the box, even if not always in the ways I want. As for AI... there's OpenAPI and GitHub Copilot, even JetBrains has their AI solutions. You pay for access to the back end component and there's IDE plugins that integrate with that, even custom IDE's or editors like Cursor. But what if you want an editor/plugin that talks to models running on your own servers? Sure, you can get models off of HuggingFace and hook them up to run locally on a machine that has the hardware to take advantage of them... but then what? What about integrating with merge requests in the aforementioned GitLab instance? Obviously it's all possible, but somehow I haven't seen many solutions that offer you something similar to GitLab but for AI. Even GitLab's own solution talks to their servers: https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/code-suggestions/ https://about.gitlab.com/solutions/code-suggestions/ > Code Suggestions is available to self-managed GitLab instances via a secure connection to GitLab.com. I'm guessing CodeGPT is probably a piece of that puzzle, or maybe the Tabnine enterprise setup.
- ffsm8 2y agoThe core of the issue is that you need beefy GPUs to really run these models at production workloads. So I think what you're currently imagining won't happen until GPU prices go down massively