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In my consulting career I sometimes get to tune database servers for performance. I have a bag of tricks that yield about +10-20% performance each. I get argum
by jiggawatts 2y ago
In my consulting career I sometimes get to tune database servers for performance. I have a bag of tricks that yield about +10-20% performance each. I get arguments about this from customers, typically along the lines of "that doesn't seem worth it."
Yeah, but 10% plus 20% plus 20%... next thing you know you're at +100% and your server is literally double the speed!
AI progress feels the same. Each little incremental improvement alone doesn't blow my skirt up, but we've had years of nearly monthly advances that have added up to something quite substantial.
- eru 2y agoYes, if you are Mary Poppins, each individual trick in your bag doesn't have to be large. (For those too young or unfamiliar: Mary Poppins famously had a bag that she could keep pulling things out of.)
- rafaelmn 2y agoExcept at some point the low hanging fruit is gone and it becomes +1%, +3% in some benchmarked use case and -1% in the general case, etc. and then come the benchmarking lies that we are seeing right now, where everyone picks a benchmark that makes them look good and its correlation to real world performance is questionable.