3 ms·

> The empirical argument > We can ask a question: how long (in nanoseconds) does it take to access a type of memory of which an average laptop has N bytes? Her

• raincole 1y ago
  The cool thing about "here's what GPT says" is that you can make GPT says whatever you want! https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6eeba-8284-800e-b399-338e6c478316 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6eeba-8284-800e-b399-338e6c4783... https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6ef4a-bdd0-800e-877a-b3d5d4dc51a4 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e6ef4a-bdd0-800e-877a-b3d5d4dc51...
  • lxgr 1y ago
    Why would it not run with your provided hypothesis? It even added an explicit hint that this is a hypothetical scaling exercise, and that real hardware does not scale like that. But generally, sure, you can make LLMs say many false things, sometimes even by just asking them a question in good faith, and it certainly casts some doubt on a blog post quoting an LLM as a source.
• mochomocha 1y ago
  The article started really well, and I was looking forward to the empirical argument. Truly mind-boggling times where "here is the empirical proof" means "here is what chatGPT says" to some people.
  • Bolwin 1y ago
    Better than "according to Google" (pre ai) which I saw cited too many times. I have a feeling that people who have such absolute trust in AI models have never hit regen and seen how much truth can vary.
    • mpalmer 1y ago
      In no way is it better than "according to Google".
      • badosu 1y ago
        Maybe when google actually did searches. A coworker today was unable to find a very straightforward quoted text on google, on duckduckgo the first few hits were exactly what we were looking for.
  • limpbizkitfan 1y ago
    its Vitalik what do you expect? Do you think Bernie Madoff was speaking objectively when talking to his potential clients?
    • pixelpoet 1y ago
      VB is a genius, no sweat (are you familiar with his work?). Madoff isn't in the same league at all, and it's disingenuous to imply otherwise.
• jychang 1y ago
  The empirical argument actually states that memory access is O(n^1/2) https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1/3_fit.png https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1/3_fit.... "The blue line is O(√N)." This has been rehashed many times before, and the best blog post on this topic is here: https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html https://www.ilikebigbits.com/2014_04_21_myth_of_ram_1.html
  • mathgradthrow 1y ago
    Empirical arguments do not apply to asymptotics anyway.
  • bollu 1y ago
    That's really neat, I hadn't seen the black hole argument before, that's really cute
  • acje 1y ago
    Thanks for the good links. I think we generally have become so accustomed to the scaled up von Neumann strategy that we don´t see how much efficiency and performance we leave on the table by not building much smaller memory hierarchies. Shameless plug here, where I explore possible gains in efficiency, performance and security by scaling out rather than up; (no subscription) https://anderscj.substack.com/p/liberal-democracies-needs-a-new-compute-d56 https://anderscj.substack.com/p/liberal-democracies-needs-a-...
• ryandrake 1y ago
  > why should I bother to read what you wrote? The better question is: Why should you bother to read what the author didn't bother to write?