6 ms·

As Rocks May Think

87 points by modeless 8mo ago

measurablefunc 8mo ago
Yes, yes, we are all going to be living in an automated & luxurious communist utopia. Here are some material facts to ground the exuberance: 1) Lifecycel of typical GPU in a data center is 1-3 years, 2) Buildout is already limited by production capacity & will hit production walls by 2027-2028 when turnover matches & exceeds production capacity, 3) TSMCs projected capacity is ~130k wafers/month & it is not keeping up w/ demand which is more than doubling, 4) Power consumption for these "geniuses" & "thinking rocks" in data centers requires lots of power & the capacity was saturated in 2025, 5) So along w/ production capacity limitations power production is now another gating factor. Anyway, like data centers in space there are lots of material limitations that all of these exuberant "ZOMG rocks can think now" essays all sweep under the rug to drive a very biased narrative about what is actually happening & the fact that all those binary bits are produced by real materials that have lifecycles & production limits not visible in the digital artifacts.
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  GPU lifecycle is 1-3 years because GPUs are becoming obsolete for cutting-edge work (especially re: power use) in that timeframe. This is good news if you'd like to see expanded use of AI. Production walls at fabs will matter little since future silicon dies will be capable of far more per unit area than current ones, so there will be plenty of incentive to upgrade.
  - measurablefunc 8mo ago
    I'm just stating facts. I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing. You can theorycraft about future utopias w/ computronium as much as you want but the facts as they stand today are what I stated.
    - groby_b 8mo ago
      "I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing" is not really a believable statement given your polemic closings.
      - measurablefunc 8mo ago
        If you think the facts are "good" or "bad" then take it up w/ the people who can do something about it to make them "better". Typical discussions about stuff like this becomes nonsensical & incoherent b/c whether you think the facts are "good" or "bad" makes no difference to the material reality & again, those are as I have stated them.
lawrenceyan 8mo ago
Biggest update I see is that he thinks AI 2027 is actually going to happen.
- emp17344 8mo ago
  We’re going to see all talk of AI 2027 quietly disappear as folks realize how out-of-touch with reality it is. I have no idea why people take that crap seriously.
munificent 8mo ago
> We are entering a golden age in which all computer science problems seem to be tractable, insomuch as we can get very useful approximations of any computable function. Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades. > the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem. We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to. I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.
- measurablefunc 8mo ago
  What you fail to understand Bob is that as long as we let the billionaires do what they want then we all automatically win. That's just how the system is designed to work, we can't lose as long as Musk & his buddies are at the helm.
  - munificent 8mo ago
    Gazing up at them adoringly, mouth open, waiting for it all to trickle down on my face.
    - measurablefunc 8mo ago
      It's the only thing us plebeians can hope for. When all is said & done the people at the top are the only ones that can truly create wealth w/ their innovative genius. The rest of us should just shut up & follow their orders for our own good.
      - drdaeman 8mo ago
        That would be a thing if wealth would correlate with innovation. I’m afraid the correlation is inverse in way too many cases.
esafak 8mo ago
This looks like a survey. Is there a thesis; any claim?
- tejohnso 8mo ago
  Sounds like OP is happy to be alive at this moment, reveling in the wonder of it all, and wanting to share.
deleted 8mo ago
[deleted]
alsetmusic 8mo ago
This person doesn't understand how LLMs work.
- DennisP 8mo ago
  Care to be more specific?
  - alsetmusic 8mo ago
    See reply in related thread.
- pradeesh 8mo ago
  Not sure how you could read this essay and come to that conclusion. It definitely aligns with my own understanding, and his conclusions seem pretty reasonable (though the AI 2027/Situational Awareness part might be arguable)
  - alsetmusic 8mo ago
    Absolutely: > In order to predict where thinking and reasoning capabilities are going, it's important to understand the trail of thought that went into today's thinking LLMs. No. You don't understand at all. They don't think. They don't reason. They are statistical word generators. They are very impressive at doing things like writing code, but they don't work the way that is being inferred here.
    - DennisP 8mo ago
      This is an outdated view. People get the idea that just because LLMs are initially trained to predict word sequences, that's all they can do. This is not the case. Transformers are general-purpose learning mechanisms. Word sequences are just the first thing we teach them. Then we train them more with human feedback. Then we sometimes hook them up to math and logic engines to train them some more, so they learn logical and mathematical reasoning. The article describes this process in a bit of detail. With "reasoning models" we also let the model have some internal monologue before generating output, so it can "think through" the problem. We didn't do all that with early LLMs. Those were just word predictors. But now we do those things, and that's why our lowly LLMs are writing huge software projects that actually work, and solving famous math problems that have been open challenges for half a century. The weirdest part of all this is that LLMs started showing signs of reasoning with an internal world model even before we trained them for it specifically. Microsoft showed this in a famous paper back in (iirc) 2023. They showed that, for example, you could give GPT4 a list of odd-shaped objects that probably wouldn't appear together in any particular source text, ask GPT4 how to stack them so they wouldn't fall over, and GPT4 would come up with a good solution. Finally, don't overlook the multimodal models, which work explicitly with images, video, and 3D world models in addition to text.
TacticalCoder 8mo ago
> As Rocks May Think I thought they meant the plural of ASRock as in "ASRocks May think" and thought this was about ASRock motherboards getting a BIOS/UEFI with an integrated LLM or something.
xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago
[flagged]
- zozbot234 8mo ago
  Nah, the ugliest prose is clanker prose and this definitely isn't. This stuff comes 100% from an actual carbon-based lifeform.
  - beeflet 8mo ago
    Who is the wise guy that gave water the ability to think
  - akovaski 8mo ago
    I think that Gemini regularly generates inane metaphors like the above. As an example, here's a message that it sent me when I was attempting to get it to generate a somewhat natural conversation: ---- Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo. Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement." Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab. ---- This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.
    - wtetzner 8mo ago
      I buy 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner and body wash.
- appellations 8mo ago
  Author is Vice President of AI, 1X Technologies.
- netsharc 8mo ago
mynameisjody 8mo ago
I'm still waiting for one of these articles to be written by someone without something to be directly gained by the hype. Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X.
- johnfn 8mo ago
  The previous post in this blog is titled "Leaving 1X". So your wait is over!
  - RealityVoid 8mo ago
    Unrelated, but it seems his previous company, 1x, was initially named Halodi and was located in Norway. And eventually, it was moved with all employees in Silicon Valley. How the hell does that work? That sounds like a logistical nightmare.Do you upend all those people's lives? Do you fire those who refuse? How many norwegians even want to go to the US? Sounds crazy to me.
    - jrmg 8mo ago
      How do they all get work visas?
    - xg15 8mo ago
      Did they actually move or is it just a "remote-first" company now? (Or even just registered in SV but still physically in Norway?) Edit: Seems like a mix of all of it: > I joined Halodi Robotics in 2022 (prior name of the company) as the only California-based employee. At the time, we were about 40 based out of Norway and 2 in Texas.
  - Paracompact 8mo ago
    Very, very likely he is remaining in the AI space.
macrocosmos 8mo ago
> AI generated videos are indistinguishable from reality.
piekvorst 8mo ago
> Chief among all changes is that machines can code and think quite well now. They can’t and never will.
- johnfn 8mo ago
  Are you really claiming that there isn't a machine in existence that can code? And that that is never possible?
  - wavemode 8mo ago
    I think "quite", "well", and "now" are the objectionable parts of the quote.
  - piekvorst 8mo ago
    It can code in an autocomplete sense. In the serious sense, if we don’t distinguish between code and thought, it can’t. Observe that modern coding agents rely heavily on heuristics. LLM excels at training datasets, at analyzing existing knowledge, but it can’t generate new knowledge on the same scale, its thinking (a process of identification and integration) is severely limited on the conscious level (context window), where being rational is most valuable. Because it doesn’t have volition, it cannot choose to be logical and not irrational, it cannot commit to attaining the full non-contradictory awareness of reality. That’s why I said “never.”
    - libraryofbabel 8mo ago
      Some of that is true, sure, but nobody who claims LLMs can code and reason about problems is claiming that they operate like humans. Can you give concrete examples of actual specific coding tasks that LLMs can’t do and never will be able to do as a consequence of all that?
      - piekvorst 8mo ago
        I think it can solve about any leetcode problem. I don’t think it can build an enterprise-grade system. It can be trained on an exiting one but these systems are not closed and no past knowledge seems to predict the future. That’s not very specific but I don’t have another answer.
lrc 8mo ago
if you click through to the linked Vannevar Bush article and scroll down there are a bunch of vintage ads around the prose that are kind of interesting. And some of the predictions have been well overtaken by events!
inimino 8mo ago
This research process is the same as what I've been doing. https://cmpr.ai/hutter/archive/ https://cmpr.ai/hutter/archive/ Claude does the research, like having an army of very fast but forgetful grad students working for free. The individual paper doesn't make much incremental improvement but once you get a pipeline of results building in a particular direction it's powerful.

87 points by modeless 8mo ago

Yes, yes, we are all going to be living in an automated & luxurious communist utopia. Here are some material facts to ground the exuberance: 1) Lifecycel of typical GPU in a data center is 1-3 years, 2) Buildout is already limited by production capacity & will hit production walls by 2027-2028 when turnover matches & exceeds production capacity, 3) TSMCs projected capacity is ~130k wafers/month & it is not keeping up w/ demand which is more than doubling, 4) Power consumption for these "geniuses" & "thinking rocks" in data centers requires lots of power & the capacity was saturated in 2025, 5) So along w/ production capacity limitations power production is now another gating factor. Anyway, like data centers in space there are lots of material limitations that all of these exuberant "ZOMG rocks can think now" essays all sweep under the rug to drive a very biased narrative about what is actually happening & the fact that all those binary bits are produced by real materials that have lifecycles & production limits not visible in the digital artifacts.

zozbot234 8mo ago
GPU lifecycle is 1-3 years because GPUs are becoming obsolete for cutting-edge work (especially re: power use) in that timeframe. This is good news if you'd like to see expanded use of AI. Production walls at fabs will matter little since future silicon dies will be capable of far more per unit area than current ones, so there will be plenty of incentive to upgrade.
- measurablefunc 8mo ago
  I'm just stating facts. I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing. You can theorycraft about future utopias w/ computronium as much as you want but the facts as they stand today are what I stated.
  - groby_b 8mo ago
    "I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing" is not really a believable statement given your polemic closings.
    - measurablefunc 8mo ago
      If you think the facts are "good" or "bad" then take it up w/ the people who can do something about it to make them "better". Typical discussions about stuff like this becomes nonsensical & incoherent b/c whether you think the facts are "good" or "bad" makes no difference to the material reality & again, those are as I have stated them.

lawrenceyan 8mo ago

Biggest update I see is that he thinks AI 2027 is actually going to happen.

emp17344 8mo ago
We’re going to see all talk of AI 2027 quietly disappear as folks realize how out-of-touch with reality it is. I have no idea why people take that crap seriously.

munificent 8mo ago

> We are entering a golden age in which all computer science problems seem to be tractable, insomuch as we can get very useful approximations of any computable function. Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades. > the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem. We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to. I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.

measurablefunc 8mo ago
What you fail to understand Bob is that as long as we let the billionaires do what they want then we all automatically win. That's just how the system is designed to work, we can't lose as long as Musk & his buddies are at the helm.
- munificent 8mo ago
  Gazing up at them adoringly, mouth open, waiting for it all to trickle down on my face.
  - measurablefunc 8mo ago
    It's the only thing us plebeians can hope for. When all is said & done the people at the top are the only ones that can truly create wealth w/ their innovative genius. The rest of us should just shut up & follow their orders for our own good.
    - drdaeman 8mo ago
      That would be a thing if wealth would correlate with innovation. I’m afraid the correlation is inverse in way too many cases.

esafak 8mo ago

This looks like a survey. Is there a thesis; any claim?

tejohnso 8mo ago
Sounds like OP is happy to be alive at this moment, reveling in the wonder of it all, and wanting to share.

deleted 8mo ago

[deleted]

alsetmusic 8mo ago

This person doesn't understand how LLMs work.

DennisP 8mo ago
Care to be more specific?
- alsetmusic 8mo ago
  See reply in related thread.
pradeesh 8mo ago
Not sure how you could read this essay and come to that conclusion. It definitely aligns with my own understanding, and his conclusions seem pretty reasonable (though the AI 2027/Situational Awareness part might be arguable)
- alsetmusic 8mo ago
  Absolutely: > In order to predict where thinking and reasoning capabilities are going, it's important to understand the trail of thought that went into today's thinking LLMs. No. You don't understand at all. They don't think. They don't reason. They are statistical word generators. They are very impressive at doing things like writing code, but they don't work the way that is being inferred here.
  - DennisP 8mo ago
    This is an outdated view. People get the idea that just because LLMs are initially trained to predict word sequences, that's all they can do. This is not the case. Transformers are general-purpose learning mechanisms. Word sequences are just the first thing we teach them. Then we train them more with human feedback. Then we sometimes hook them up to math and logic engines to train them some more, so they learn logical and mathematical reasoning. The article describes this process in a bit of detail. With "reasoning models" we also let the model have some internal monologue before generating output, so it can "think through" the problem. We didn't do all that with early LLMs. Those were just word predictors. But now we do those things, and that's why our lowly LLMs are writing huge software projects that actually work, and solving famous math problems that have been open challenges for half a century. The weirdest part of all this is that LLMs started showing signs of reasoning with an internal world model even before we trained them for it specifically. Microsoft showed this in a famous paper back in (iirc) 2023. They showed that, for example, you could give GPT4 a list of odd-shaped objects that probably wouldn't appear together in any particular source text, ask GPT4 how to stack them so they wouldn't fall over, and GPT4 would come up with a good solution. Finally, don't overlook the multimodal models, which work explicitly with images, video, and 3D world models in addition to text.

TacticalCoder 8mo ago

> As Rocks May Think I thought they meant the plural of ASRock as in "ASRocks May think" and thought this was about ASRock motherboards getting a BIOS/UEFI with an integrated LLM or something.

xyzsparetimexyz 8mo ago

[flagged]

zozbot234 8mo ago
Nah, the ugliest prose is clanker prose and this definitely isn't. This stuff comes 100% from an actual carbon-based lifeform.
- beeflet 8mo ago
  Who is the wise guy that gave water the ability to think
- akovaski 8mo ago
  I think that Gemini regularly generates inane metaphors like the above. As an example, here's a message that it sent me when I was attempting to get it to generate a somewhat natural conversation: ---- Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo. Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement." Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab. ---- This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.
  - wtetzner 8mo ago
    I buy 3-in-1 shampoo, conditioner and body wash.
appellations 8mo ago
Author is Vice President of AI, 1X Technologies.
netsharc 8mo ago

mynameisjody 8mo ago

I'm still waiting for one of these articles to be written by someone without something to be directly gained by the hype. Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X.

johnfn 8mo ago
The previous post in this blog is titled "Leaving 1X". So your wait is over!
- RealityVoid 8mo ago
  Unrelated, but it seems his previous company, 1x, was initially named Halodi and was located in Norway. And eventually, it was moved with all employees in Silicon Valley. How the hell does that work? That sounds like a logistical nightmare.Do you upend all those people's lives? Do you fire those who refuse? How many norwegians even want to go to the US? Sounds crazy to me.
  - jrmg 8mo ago
    How do they all get work visas?
  - xg15 8mo ago
    Did they actually move or is it just a "remote-first" company now? (Or even just registered in SV but still physically in Norway?) Edit: Seems like a mix of all of it: > I joined Halodi Robotics in 2022 (prior name of the company) as the only California-based employee. At the time, we were about 40 based out of Norway and 2 in Texas.
- Paracompact 8mo ago
  Very, very likely he is remaining in the AI space.

macrocosmos 8mo ago

> AI generated videos are indistinguishable from reality.

piekvorst 8mo ago

> Chief among all changes is that machines can code and think quite well now. They can’t and never will.

johnfn 8mo ago
Are you really claiming that there isn't a machine in existence that can code? And that that is never possible?
- wavemode 8mo ago
  I think "quite", "well", and "now" are the objectionable parts of the quote.
- piekvorst 8mo ago
  It can code in an autocomplete sense. In the serious sense, if we don’t distinguish between code and thought, it can’t. Observe that modern coding agents rely heavily on heuristics. LLM excels at training datasets, at analyzing existing knowledge, but it can’t generate new knowledge on the same scale, its thinking (a process of identification and integration) is severely limited on the conscious level (context window), where being rational is most valuable. Because it doesn’t have volition, it cannot choose to be logical and not irrational, it cannot commit to attaining the full non-contradictory awareness of reality. That’s why I said “never.”
  - libraryofbabel 8mo ago
    Some of that is true, sure, but nobody who claims LLMs can code and reason about problems is claiming that they operate like humans. Can you give concrete examples of actual specific coding tasks that LLMs can’t do and never will be able to do as a consequence of all that?
    - piekvorst 8mo ago
      I think it can solve about any leetcode problem. I don’t think it can build an enterprise-grade system. It can be trained on an exiting one but these systems are not closed and no past knowledge seems to predict the future. That’s not very specific but I don’t have another answer.

lrc 8mo ago

if you click through to the linked Vannevar Bush article and scroll down there are a bunch of vintage ads around the prose that are kind of interesting. And some of the predictions have been well overtaken by events!

inimino 8mo ago

This research process is the same as what I've been doing. https://cmpr.ai/hutter/archive/ https://cmpr.ai/hutter/archive/ Claude does the research, like having an army of very fast but forgetful grad students working for free. The individual paper doesn't make much incremental improvement but once you get a pipeline of results building in a particular direction it's powerful.