3 ms·

> If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck is human decision-making time, not compute cost. This seems entirely backwards. Why spend mo

> If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck is human decision-making time, not compute cost. This seems entirely backwards. Why spend money to optimize something that _isn't_ the bottleneck?

Davidzheng 8mo ago
Am i misunderstanding? spending more tokens certainly is not optimizing for compute cost. It's the opposite
Towaway69 8mo ago
Any human in the loop will be a bottleneck in comparison to AI performance. If we take that to its logical conclusion, I think we can answer that question. Getting rid of humans, unfortunately, also takes away their earnings and therefore their ability to purchase whatever product you are developing. The ultra rich can only purchase your product so often - hence better make it a subscription model. So there is pressure on purchasing power versus earnings. Interesting to see what happens and why.
- PunchyHamster 8mo ago
  Just sell it to govt, then you can take printed money directly instead of having to go thru such filthy thing as "consumers"
swiftcoder 8mo ago
I think I finally understand why the LLM craze is like catnip to management types - they think they've found a cheat code to workaround the mythical man-month
- walterbell 8mo ago
  https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445 https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445 For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month. If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead. That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic. You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech.
  - kamaal 8mo ago
    A women can at times, in extremely rare occasions have twins, or triplets, or quadruplets. In 9 months. So that only goes some distance and then you face new limitations.
Cyphase 8mo ago
Maybe it could have been written slightly clearer, but I think the intended meaning is, "If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck should be human decision-making time, not agent compute time."
gozzoo 8mo ago
I'm not sure I agree with this. 10x more tokens means leaaving the agent to work for 10x longer, which may lead to bugs and misintepretation of the intention. Breaking the goal into multiple tasks seems more efficient in terms of tokens and getting close to the desired goal. Of course this means more human involvment, but probably not 10x more.
JimDabell 8mo ago
The day being referred to is the human’s time, not the AI’s time. That sentence is saying substitute the cheap, abundant resource for the expensive, bottlenecked resource.

Davidzheng 8mo ago

Am i misunderstanding? spending more tokens certainly is not optimizing for compute cost. It's the opposite

Towaway69 8mo ago

Any human in the loop will be a bottleneck in comparison to AI performance. If we take that to its logical conclusion, I think we can answer that question. Getting rid of humans, unfortunately, also takes away their earnings and therefore their ability to purchase whatever product you are developing. The ultra rich can only purchase your product so often - hence better make it a subscription model. So there is pressure on purchasing power versus earnings. Interesting to see what happens and why.

PunchyHamster 8mo ago
Just sell it to govt, then you can take printed money directly instead of having to go thru such filthy thing as "consumers"

swiftcoder 8mo ago

I think I finally understand why the LLM craze is like catnip to management types - they think they've found a cheat code to workaround the mythical man-month

walterbell 8mo ago
https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445 https://x.com/a16z/status/2018418113952555445 For my whole life in technology, there was this thing called the Mythical Man Month: nine women cannot have a baby in a month. If you're Google, you can't just put a thousand software engineers on a product and wipe out a startup because you can only... build that product with seven or eight people. Once they've figured it out, they've got that lead. That's not true with AI. If you have data and you have enough GPUs, you can solve almost any problem. It is magic. You can throw money at the problem. We've never had that in tech.
- kamaal 8mo ago
  A women can at times, in extremely rare occasions have twins, or triplets, or quadruplets. In 9 months. So that only goes some distance and then you face new limitations.

Cyphase 8mo ago

Maybe it could have been written slightly clearer, but I think the intended meaning is, "If 10x more tokens saves a day, spend the tokens. The bottleneck should be human decision-making time, not agent compute time."

gozzoo 8mo ago

I'm not sure I agree with this. 10x more tokens means leaaving the agent to work for 10x longer, which may lead to bugs and misintepretation of the intention. Breaking the goal into multiple tasks seems more efficient in terms of tokens and getting close to the desired goal. Of course this means more human involvment, but probably not 10x more.

JimDabell 8mo ago

The day being referred to is the human’s time, not the AI’s time. That sentence is saying substitute the cheap, abundant resource for the expensive, bottlenecked resource.