7 ms·

GPU World

403 points by simonpure 1mo ago

ryukoposting 1mo ago
After the first couple paragraphs I thought this was going to be a parody of One Laptop Per Child. Sadly it wasn't.
tucnak 1mo ago
Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
- avaer 1mo ago
  Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee. And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
- gwern 1mo ago
  > I wonder if they will accept a play. We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it. (Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
  - avaer 1mo ago
    > $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
  - 2ajshg17 1mo ago
    Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous. How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative: "AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"
deleted 1mo ago
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jdub 1mo ago
LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use. Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
- koolala 1mo ago
  It's a story writing competition...
  - jdub 1mo ago
    Yeah, but I'm not going to write a short story about the Butlerian Jihad's inquisitors chasing down everyone who owns a GPU for this competition.
- blkhawk 1mo ago
  As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
  - jdub 1mo ago
    It was very much both.
- fangspire 1mo ago
  Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
- qrios 1mo ago
  From Dune by Frank Herbert. See "Butlerian Jihad" [1] [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad
peter_d_sherman 1mo ago
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?" What great questions! These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class! Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist! You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time... That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective... We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere... Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes... You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
- left-struck 1mo ago
  Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
padolsey 1mo ago
We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
- avaer 1mo ago
  One interesting formulation is that humans are the sex organs of AI.
not2b 1mo ago
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
- avaer 1mo ago
  Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested. The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
- i5heu 1mo ago
  8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
  - not2b 1mo ago
    So demand quadruples if they are always on, and doubles if they are on 1/3 of the time. Either way, too much.
- sriniwasx 1mo ago
  Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
- tossandthrow 1mo ago
  Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption. Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
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NitpickLawyer 1mo ago
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things. > Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models. Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore. [1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-model https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
- abrookewood 1mo ago
  Haven't read that one yet, but his Children of Time series is sooo good.
- yitchelle 1mo ago
  Yes, that book is a stark reminder (or prediction).
- ideasman42 1mo ago
  I couldn't believe it when the "real" news headline was reported - destructively scanning books. I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
  - jaggederest 1mo ago
    Down the pipe, I think it's medium likely we'll start destructively scanning humans. Wild stuff, honestly.
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  The more I use Fable the more impressed I am with it. I am still learning how to use it, same with gpt-5.6-sol. I don't think the model has changed much, but both models have gotten smarter in leaps and bounds as I've improved the documentation, context, how I provide work to them and how I specify success. (And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.) I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.
divbzero 1mo ago
Quite an interesting selection committee: Neal Stephenson Gwern Branwen Matt Huang
- jephs 1mo ago
  Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.
rixed 1mo ago
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed". What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed. For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
- gwern 1mo ago
  > Turned out: not much have changed. I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    Most people still go to work every day, inequality still exists, as does famine, disease, wars… Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.
    - cheema33 1mo ago
      > Most people still go to work every day.. And trees and mountains and animals still exist... Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
    - bawolff 1mo ago
      > Most people still go to work every day, Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.
newyankee 1mo ago
there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  “In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”
  - worldsayshi 1mo ago
    I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.
    - bertylicious 1mo ago
      But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
      - rbanffy 1mo ago
        Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.
    - rbanffy 1mo ago
      This is kind of why we need more Star Trek. Not that I don’t enjoy others, but I prefer space communism to almost any other possible future, especially the ones Peter Thiel has reserved for us.
GalaxyNova 1mo ago
What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?
XCSme 1mo ago
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years. Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen. So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
- worldsayshi 1mo ago
  I think the point of stories like these is to accept that the world is too complex to fit into a story but we can try to fit a part of it anyway and we might learn something from it or at least get an interesting experience.
- XRG 1mo ago
  Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)
orlp 1mo ago
If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double. The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.
- hhjinks 1mo ago
  500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.
  - pixl97 1mo ago
    Really the METR report on autonomous agent behaviors is a required read. I think the AI's would only do a tiny percent of their talking to their human. Voice itself is only a limited method that we interact with the world. Imagine the LLM seeing what you see, monitoring your health, monitoring your interactions with the world around you and then optimizing around that. For these things it will be talking to its own agents/subagents and the AI agents that operate the services of the world in this imaginary world. Maybe you also think of it as a self contained business that provides services to you. Even when you're not busy consuming services from that business, that business typically keeps running and doing things for when you need it next.
- cheema33 1mo ago
  > If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person... Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
- terhechte 1mo ago
  A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then): ((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt. AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.
mkagenius 1mo ago
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use. Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA. If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
- cheema33 1mo ago
  > Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist. > If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then. You appear to think in absolute terms. I am guessing you are very young.
  - calmoo 1mo ago
    Pangram is very accurate
    - jedberg 1mo ago
      No it isn't. I've put human written material in there (my own unpublished material) and it says 90%+ AI. Then I put some AI material in and it said 30% chance of AI. I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
      - ekelsen 1mo ago
        Can you share your human piece that got flagged? And the AI piece that didn't? (Or snippets?) I've found pangram to be very accurate, so I'm curious.
        1mo ago
camillomiller 1mo ago
I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave. That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
raincole 1mo ago
> What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365 One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
- charlieyu1 1mo ago
  And? Virtually everyone in the world has internet
  - tappio 1mo ago
    Good argument going here but here is what internet tells me about 'facts': Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around. In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
    - bbmatryoshka 1mo ago
      with a good enough LLM you can greatly increase the capability to build a functioning well (and other basic infrastructures) in remote and undeveloped areas without great technical knowledge, they are very good as assistants for practical tasks where you can give feedback step by step on what is happening
- bawolff 1mo ago
  Its a sci-fi story prompt. Do non tech bros not understand the concept of fiction?
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  > What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world? Did you even read the prompt
HyperAI 1mo ago
[flagged]
thatgloomyguy 1mo ago
GPU per person or models working on less computing power
Zoo3y 1mo ago
Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.
markoutso 1mo ago
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
Kalendermann 1mo ago
It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!
gizajob 1mo ago
Literally just write “the young lady’s illustrated primer” again. Stephenson already called it.
- mdda 1mo ago
  Or : "The young GPU's illustrated human primer"
adventured 1mo ago
We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI. Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok. We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al. They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have. They're not going to create anything. Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent). If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
- noir_lord 1mo ago
  This may be the most HN comment I've ever read. What a fantastically bleak world view.
- nylonstrung 1mo ago
  The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back
- jillesvangurp 1mo ago
  We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is. The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course. And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least. You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid. I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.
maxnevermind 1mo ago
> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
- pazimzadeh 1mo ago
  that's a lot of opinion without much reasoning/support even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
- dgellow 1mo ago
  Also, way more centralization, with all that logic pushed to a few AI vendors
- setopt 1mo ago
  I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology. EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.
sudohalt 1mo ago
Will any of the data submitted be used in training? We are all given the prompt and you will get a few thousand (maybe tens of thousands of submissions). Seems like a great source of training material.
- gwern 1mo ago
  We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM that much more valuable...) Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.
  - deleted 25d ago
    [deleted]
sriniwasx 1mo ago
Looking at the trends, local AI is the future, smaller models are getting faster and high demands always leads to oversupply if you've got resources, just look at all the AI data-centers, If small models go mainstream GPU's and data-centers will become dirt-cheap.
roschdal 1mo ago
Dystopian.
_joel 1mo ago
Anyone else sing that in there head as, "Where in the world, GPU world".
0xjei 1mo ago
They want to give you a GPU justified for the AI revolution but, they discourage the usage of LLMs lol
SSLy 1mo ago
> fonts haven't loaded, reload the page oh bugger off
tigerhuliu 1mo ago
[flagged]
BillStrong 1mo ago
I mean, why would we wait til then? AMD is buying a company that put LLama 3.1 7b(or something close) on silicon, and can give you 15k t/s, Qwen just released Qwen 3.8 Next that seperates the intelligence from the database, so the intelligence is 6b and the rest can be done on CPU. You can put that 6b on the AMD silicon, and then use another accelerator to speed up the database if you need fast PP, and you are now much faster than the B300 after optimizations such as caching the Prompt once, and keeping it around, and many others. Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.
pjmlp 1mo ago
They already have, unfortunately most devs still don't target GPU and NPUs available on their mobile devices. Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.
anonzzzies 1mo ago
That's pessimistic. In 2040 we have a cluster of b300 equals or more in our phone.
ezoe 1mo ago
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background. To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer. Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap. So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population. But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI. The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
- lnrd 1mo ago
  It's "what if" thought exercise, doesn't need to be an accurate (or realistic) prediction.
chrismorgan 1mo ago
This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load). Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page. (I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)
- algoth1 1mo ago
  Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js
  - HNDevsSuck 1mo ago
    [dead]
  - FuriouslyAdrift 1mo ago
    Privacy Badger didn't show any trackers.
  - megagpt1 1mo ago
    Font-based fingerprinting is a thing too
- debo_ 1mo ago
  This is what happens when the world has a gpu per person
- huangm 1mo ago
  Sorry, we’ll fix!
oinoom 1mo ago
The premise of the story is silly. If AI gets cheaper and faster, then it certainly will get smarter (just not in the raw sense) as harnesses, tool access, memory, etc. improve. You can’t hold intelligence as a fixed variable but then imply other aspects of it improve
spl757 1mo ago
What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.
Unified-Mentor 1mo ago
[dead]
Waterluvian 1mo ago
My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.
Mistletoe 1mo ago
Weird things like this website are top signals. “A chicken in every pot.”
nekusar 1mo ago
I'd write to this. It could be really fun... But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.
xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
More or less every person owns a GPU (mobile) already. They use it for rendering your stupid website. In addition, many have desktop GPUs. Which they use for gaming. Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.
- cyanydeez 1mo ago
  someone woke up on the wrong side of the AI revolution
  - xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
    I honestly wouldn't have minded if the article was titled 'what if we had an AI processor per person?'
prima-facie 1mo ago
> What if the world had one GPU per person? It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.
- dkenyser 1mo ago
  This comment is needlessly pedantic. Surely you're able to understand what their implication is.
25ahG 1mo ago
The contest is sponsored (https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules) by a crypto bro firm that also invested in FTX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm... And by an AI company: https://guardianangel-ai.com/ https://guardianangel-ai.com/ This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.
trial3 1mo ago
we can't do this with food. why would we be able to do this with GPUs
CurbStomper 1mo ago
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thedevbirb 1mo ago
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itomato 1mo ago
All the world has access to forks/chopsticks/spoons, but every person has a preference that might be N+1 or 0. Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed? It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.
hn2crljhhy 1mo ago
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nbardy 1mo ago
One of the amazing things is that when every has one GPU, they will actually have 1k-10k agents at their disposal. LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user. This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.
gb2d_hn 1mo ago
I haven't got 1000 words in me, but here's what I think might make for a plausible story. Maybe a little too Matrix adjacent!: The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence. The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners. New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model. We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous. The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress. To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations. But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt. We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases. But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'. A new religion was started, and chaos followed.
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tmaly 1mo ago
I don't see how an even playing field can exist given the Power law
re6tor 1mo ago
Do submissions need to be in English? If so, that'll prevent a huge chunk of us from participating.
- hansvm 1mo ago
  I'd be surprised if the 3 judges share a common language other than English at the requisite level for judging writing.
hansvm 1mo ago
I'm not sure what else might happen, but at a minimum the Babel Fish will finally be real, even without internet.
akoumjian 1mo ago
This is a great contest. > never becomes superhuman Arguably, we are already there. I think the idea of the intelligence not scaling far beyond what we have now is worth considering, though doubtful.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  Being able to logically reason about where to explore a problem space, and then direct thousands of agents on doing just that is a superhuman ability. Hell, we recently did that on accident! The question really boils down to just how far is really really far? If the intelligence problem gets big-O notation hard as you climb the scale then something just a itty-bitty-bit smarter than you might as well be a million miles past you. I also wonder about different directions of scaling too. For example humans aren't getting much smarter over time and we've started horizontal scaling. Governments and corporations for example. All the richest people in the world are heads of corporations or governments that gain wealth on the concentration of that power. It doesn't seem beyond imagination that AI could expand into that market and fit very well.
jgbuddy 1mo ago
I appreciate their AI usage policy and agree with it
debbiedowner 1mo ago
Hmm I wonder what the preselection to get to the top 10 are? Human readers or automated?
aw123 1mo ago
Sorry, but this premise is just poorly thought out slop. The premise explicitly names an extremely narrow set of unlikely futures. The world unfolds forward from the present. It doesn't start at some arbitrary hyper-specific hypothetical future you want and you performing a bunch of mental gymnastics to get there. > "imagine the future, evenly distributed." Yeah that sounds like you just get disqualified if your story is anything but "we all live under UBI and receive our equal rations from the world central government". If you want actual interesting ideas about positive potential futures, change the premise.
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GPU World

403 points by simonpure 1mo ago

ryukoposting 1mo ago

After the first couple paragraphs I thought this was going to be a parody of One Laptop Per Child. Sadly it wasn't.

tucnak 1mo ago

Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.

avaer 1mo ago
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee. And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.
gwern 1mo ago
> I wonder if they will accept a play. We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it. (Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_the_United_States https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
- avaer 1mo ago
  > $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
- 2ajshg17 1mo ago
  Of course. Ex Sequoia members and crypto bros are generous. How are you going to evaluate 10^6 submissions? Let me guess: You'll preselect with AI for the expedient narrative: "AI will be democratized and a small model will run on any GPU and there will be no oligarchies and China will pay for all of it!"

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jdub 1mo ago

LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use. Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

koolala 1mo ago
It's a story writing competition...
- jdub 1mo ago
  Yeah, but I'm not going to write a short story about the Butlerian Jihad's inquisitors chasing down everyone who owns a GPU for this competition.
blkhawk 1mo ago
As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
- jdub 1mo ago
  It was very much both.
fangspire 1mo ago
Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
qrios 1mo ago
From Dune by Frank Herbert. See "Butlerian Jihad" [1] [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

peter_d_sherman 1mo ago

>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?" What great questions! These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class! Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist! You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time... That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective... We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere... Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes... You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)

left-struck 1mo ago
Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…

padolsey 1mo ago

We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.

avaer 1mo ago
One interesting formulation is that humans are the sex organs of AI.

not2b 1mo ago

Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.

avaer 1mo ago
Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested. The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
i5heu 1mo ago
8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.
- not2b 1mo ago
  So demand quadruples if they are always on, and doubles if they are on 1/3 of the time. Either way, too much.
sriniwasx 1mo ago
Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
tossandthrow 1mo ago
Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption. Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).
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NitpickLawyer 1mo ago

I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things. > Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board. I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models. Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore. [1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-model https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...

abrookewood 1mo ago
Haven't read that one yet, but his Children of Time series is sooo good.
yitchelle 1mo ago
Yes, that book is a stark reminder (or prediction).
ideasman42 1mo ago
I couldn't believe it when the "real" news headline was reported - destructively scanning books. I thought this was one of the less plausible parts of the book, Sigh! :)
- jaggederest 1mo ago
  Down the pipe, I think it's medium likely we'll start destructively scanning humans. Wild stuff, honestly.
jaggederest 1mo ago
The more I use Fable the more impressed I am with it. I am still learning how to use it, same with gpt-5.6-sol. I don't think the model has changed much, but both models have gotten smarter in leaps and bounds as I've improved the documentation, context, how I provide work to them and how I specify success. (And generally that consists of keeping only the very most relevant details and deleting a lot of the boilerplate I used to need for other models, it's a great trend.) I am excited for the next tier of models, but I could readily work for the rest of my career feeling like I have superpowers with only what we have right now. I'm also very excited for the idea of these same strength models getting faster, and much, much cheaper.

divbzero 1mo ago

Quite an interesting selection committee: Neal Stephenson Gwern Branwen Matt Huang

jephs 1mo ago
Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.

rixed 1mo ago

Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed". What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed. For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".

gwern 1mo ago
> Turned out: not much have changed. I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
- rbanffy 1mo ago
  Most people still go to work every day, inequality still exists, as does famine, disease, wars… Our cars are cleaner, our phones are much better, our TVs much lighter and bigger.
  - cheema33 1mo ago
    > Most people still go to work every day.. And trees and mountains and animals still exist... Rate of change, it appears, depends entirely on someone's perspective.
  - bawolff 1mo ago
    > Most people still go to work every day, Ironically, that is one of the things that have changed. In 1980 working from home was borderline unthinkable. Now, while it is far from universal its also not that unusual.

newyankee 1mo ago

there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.

rbanffy 1mo ago
“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”
- worldsayshi 1mo ago
  I think there are scenarios, however (un)likely that will lead us to this point. Imaging them and spreading such ideas can make that more likely.
  - bertylicious 1mo ago
    But the contest does not ask what needs to happen to achieve even and fair distribution of wealth, it specifically asks what might happen after we reached that point. That kind of blindness towards today's political and socio-economic conditions has always been very typical for this kind of techno optimism. I believe it actually prevents revolutionary thought by assuming some kind of revolution has already occurred somehow in order to then attribute all following societal progress to the technology alone.
    - rbanffy 1mo ago
      Telling the story of how we averted the current dystopian path and moved to an utopian AI-assisted society would be a very nice story to read. We desperately need more utopian science-fiction and we can't rely on Star Trek to provide a path forward or an ideal goal for our civilisation.
  - rbanffy 1mo ago
    This is kind of why we need more Star Trek. Not that I don’t enjoy others, but I prefer space communism to almost any other possible future, especially the ones Peter Thiel has reserved for us.

GalaxyNova 1mo ago

What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?

XCSme 1mo ago

We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years. Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen. So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too

worldsayshi 1mo ago
I think the point of stories like these is to accept that the world is too complex to fit into a story but we can try to fit a part of it anyway and we might learn something from it or at least get an interesting experience.
XRG 1mo ago
Boredom may cause teenagers to commit acts of vandalism; it’s not a typical cause for revolution. (That would be things like famine, gross inequality, severe injustices and so on.)

orlp 1mo ago

If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double. The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.

hhjinks 1mo ago
500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.
- pixl97 1mo ago
  Really the METR report on autonomous agent behaviors is a required read. I think the AI's would only do a tiny percent of their talking to their human. Voice itself is only a limited method that we interact with the world. Imagine the LLM seeing what you see, monitoring your health, monitoring your interactions with the world around you and then optimizing around that. For these things it will be talking to its own agents/subagents and the AI agents that operate the services of the world in this imaginary world. Maybe you also think of it as a self contained business that provides services to you. Even when you're not busy consuming services from that business, that business typically keeps running and doing things for when you need it next.
cheema33 1mo ago
> If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person... Would we all be driving the 500 Watt GPU hard 24/7? And the premise that the "AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026" likely does not include semiconductor progress. You are very likely to be able to run Fable class AI model on something that is significantly more efficient in 2040.
terhechte 1mo ago
A Mac Studio m4 max in low power mode consumes ~50-100 watt on 100% gpu consumption. On GPU idle it is ~10 watt. If we imagine improved models (e.g. qwen 3.8 is a 5b moe which is way faster to process) and improved chip performance on 2nm and half a day of usage (the AI will sleep when we sleep then): ((75 watt / 2 [faster models]) / 2 [faster chips]) / 2 [half a day of usage]) => ~ 10 watt. AI for everyone does not imply pC mAsTeRraCe for everyone.

mkagenius 1mo ago

> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use. Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA. If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.

cheema33 1mo ago
> Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose Do you know of a "checker" that can reliably detect AI-assisted writing with 100% accuracy? One does not exist. > If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then. You appear to think in absolute terms. I am guessing you are very young.
- calmoo 1mo ago
  Pangram is very accurate
  - jedberg 1mo ago
    No it isn't. I've put human written material in there (my own unpublished material) and it says 90%+ AI. Then I put some AI material in and it said 30% chance of AI. I only tested it with the two pieces, but was not impressed.
    - ekelsen 1mo ago
      Can you share your human piece that got flagged? And the AI piece that didn't? (Or snippets?) I've found pangram to be very accurate, so I'm curious.
      - 1mo ago

camillomiller 1mo ago

I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave. That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.

raincole 1mo ago

> What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365 One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?

charlieyu1 1mo ago
And? Virtually everyone in the world has internet
- tappio 1mo ago
  Good argument going here but here is what internet tells me about 'facts': Its about the same amount of population who have access to clean water and who have access to internet, and that's maybe about 75% of global population for both. Don't know how they overlap, but probably there is people who have no access to internet but have access to clean water and the other way around. In absolute terms that is still billions of people. Billions.
  - bbmatryoshka 1mo ago
    with a good enough LLM you can greatly increase the capability to build a functioning well (and other basic infrastructures) in remote and undeveloped areas without great technical knowledge, they are very good as assistants for practical tasks where you can give feedback step by step on what is happening
bawolff 1mo ago
Its a sci-fi story prompt. Do non tech bros not understand the concept of fiction?
nylonstrung 1mo ago
> What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world? Did you even read the prompt

HyperAI 1mo ago

[flagged]

thatgloomyguy 1mo ago

GPU per person or models working on less computing power

Zoo3y 1mo ago

Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.

markoutso 1mo ago

Kalendermann 1mo ago

It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!

gizajob 1mo ago

Literally just write “the young lady’s illustrated primer” again. Stephenson already called it.

mdda 1mo ago
Or : "The young GPU's illustrated human primer"

adventured 1mo ago

We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI. Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok. We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al. They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have. They're not going to create anything. Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent). If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.

noir_lord 1mo ago
This may be the most HN comment I've ever read. What a fantastically bleak world view.
nylonstrung 1mo ago
The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back
jillesvangurp 1mo ago
We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is. The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course. And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least. You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid. I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.

maxnevermind 1mo ago

> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like? If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.

pazimzadeh 1mo ago
that's a lot of opinion without much reasoning/support even if you're right, all fields are progressing at the same time, including biology, and the synergies are going to be significant
dgellow 1mo ago
Also, way more centralization, with all that logic pushed to a few AI vendors
setopt 1mo ago
I disagree with this take. While LLMs themselves are currently unreliable, the work done in the math community on hooking up creative LLMs to reliable verifiers like Lean show that it’s possible to construct systems where the unreliability is suppressed. For now, that still requires experts to set up and monitor, but I do believe that in a couple of decades we’ll make progress on how to do more mundane tasks in a reliable way without expert supervision, where an LLM still sits as the translation layer between humans and machines. And that universal human-to-machine translator, I would certainly consider a foundational technology. EDIT: If you asked people on the street in 1990, they’d probably not consider the Internet to be in the same category as the Steam engine either. I mean, you already had phone and fax, so it wasn’t that ground breaking. And I’ve even read articles from the mid-90s declaring the Internet a temporary fad.

sudohalt 1mo ago

Will any of the data submitted be used in training? We are all given the prompt and you will get a few thousand (maybe tens of thousands of submissions). Seems like a great source of training material.

gwern 1mo ago
We do not intend to train on them, no. This never even occurred to me to address in the rules. (What would be the point? There will be few good submissions and they would be a vanishingly small % of existing training data and this doesn't seem like a super-valuable task in general that would make a LLM that much more valuable...) Personally, I would encourage participants to publish their pieces independently. Note that we only require a non-exclusive CC-BY-NC license for the ones we select as winners, which is intended to allow people to republish the good pieces themselves, especially commercially.
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sriniwasx 1mo ago

Looking at the trends, local AI is the future, smaller models are getting faster and high demands always leads to oversupply if you've got resources, just look at all the AI data-centers, If small models go mainstream GPU's and data-centers will become dirt-cheap.

roschdal 1mo ago

Dystopian.

_joel 1mo ago

Anyone else sing that in there head as, "Where in the world, GPU world".

0xjei 1mo ago

They want to give you a GPU justified for the AI revolution but, they discourage the usage of LLMs lol

SSLy 1mo ago

> fonts haven't loaded, reload the page oh bugger off

tigerhuliu 1mo ago

[flagged]

BillStrong 1mo ago

I mean, why would we wait til then? AMD is buying a company that put LLama 3.1 7b(or something close) on silicon, and can give you 15k t/s, Qwen just released Qwen 3.8 Next that seperates the intelligence from the database, so the intelligence is 6b and the rest can be done on CPU. You can put that 6b on the AMD silicon, and then use another accelerator to speed up the database if you need fast PP, and you are now much faster than the B300 after optimizations such as caching the Prompt once, and keeping it around, and many others. Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.

pjmlp 1mo ago

They already have, unfortunately most devs still don't target GPU and NPUs available on their mobile devices. Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.

anonzzzies 1mo ago

That's pessimistic. In 2040 we have a cluster of b300 equals or more in our phone.

ezoe 1mo ago

Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background. To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer. Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap. So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population. But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI. The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?

lnrd 1mo ago
It's "what if" thought exercise, doesn't need to be an accurate (or realistic) prediction.

chrismorgan 1mo ago

This website has the distinction of being the first basically-just-content website I have ever encountered to break when web fonts are blocked (or otherwise fail to load). Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page. (I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)

algoth1 1mo ago
Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js
- HNDevsSuck 1mo ago
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- FuriouslyAdrift 1mo ago
  Privacy Badger didn't show any trackers.
- megagpt1 1mo ago
  Font-based fingerprinting is a thing too
debo_ 1mo ago
This is what happens when the world has a gpu per person
huangm 1mo ago
Sorry, we’ll fix!

oinoom 1mo ago

The premise of the story is silly. If AI gets cheaper and faster, then it certainly will get smarter (just not in the raw sense) as harnesses, tool access, memory, etc. improve. You can’t hold intelligence as a fixed variable but then imply other aspects of it improve

spl757 1mo ago

What scares me is AI running in a humanoid robot. Maybe it's time to listen to Isaac Asimov and implement the three laws of robotics. Maybe it's past time.

Unified-Mentor 1mo ago

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Waterluvian 1mo ago

My submission: there’s a writing competition with a $100,000 prize for the best AI-generated story. But to get an edge, the protagonist cheats by writing it themselves.

Mistletoe 1mo ago

Weird things like this website are top signals. “A chicken in every pot.”

nekusar 1mo ago

I'd write to this. It could be really fun... But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.

xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago

More or less every person owns a GPU (mobile) already. They use it for rendering your stupid website. In addition, many have desktop GPUs. Which they use for gaming. Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.

cyanydeez 1mo ago
someone woke up on the wrong side of the AI revolution
- xyzsparetimexyz 1mo ago
  I honestly wouldn't have minded if the article was titled 'what if we had an AI processor per person?'

prima-facie 1mo ago

> What if the world had one GPU per person? It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.

dkenyser 1mo ago
This comment is needlessly pedantic. Surely you're able to understand what their implication is.

25ahG 1mo ago

The contest is sponsored (https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules https://www.gpuworld.org/official-rules) by a crypto bro firm that also invested in FTX: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm... And by an AI company: https://guardianangel-ai.com/ https://guardianangel-ai.com/ This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.

trial3 1mo ago

we can't do this with food. why would we be able to do this with GPUs

CurbStomper 1mo ago

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thedevbirb 1mo ago

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itomato 1mo ago

All the world has access to forks/chopsticks/spoons, but every person has a preference that might be N+1 or 0. Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed? It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.

hn2crljhhy 1mo ago

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nbardy 1mo ago

One of the amazing things is that when every has one GPU, they will actually have 1k-10k agents at their disposal. LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user. This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.

gb2d_hn 1mo ago

I haven't got 1000 words in me, but here's what I think might make for a plausible story. Maybe a little too Matrix adjacent!: The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence. The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners. New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model. We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous. The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress. To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations. But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt. We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases. But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'. A new religion was started, and chaos followed.

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tmaly 1mo ago

I don't see how an even playing field can exist given the Power law

re6tor 1mo ago

Do submissions need to be in English? If so, that'll prevent a huge chunk of us from participating.

hansvm 1mo ago
I'd be surprised if the 3 judges share a common language other than English at the requisite level for judging writing.

hansvm 1mo ago

I'm not sure what else might happen, but at a minimum the Babel Fish will finally be real, even without internet.

akoumjian 1mo ago

This is a great contest. > never becomes superhuman Arguably, we are already there. I think the idea of the intelligence not scaling far beyond what we have now is worth considering, though doubtful.

pixl97 1mo ago
Being able to logically reason about where to explore a problem space, and then direct thousands of agents on doing just that is a superhuman ability. Hell, we recently did that on accident! The question really boils down to just how far is really really far? If the intelligence problem gets big-O notation hard as you climb the scale then something just a itty-bitty-bit smarter than you might as well be a million miles past you. I also wonder about different directions of scaling too. For example humans aren't getting much smarter over time and we've started horizontal scaling. Governments and corporations for example. All the richest people in the world are heads of corporations or governments that gain wealth on the concentration of that power. It doesn't seem beyond imagination that AI could expand into that market and fit very well.

jgbuddy 1mo ago

I appreciate their AI usage policy and agree with it

debbiedowner 1mo ago

Hmm I wonder what the preselection to get to the top 10 are? Human readers or automated?

aw123 1mo ago

Sorry, but this premise is just poorly thought out slop. The premise explicitly names an extremely narrow set of unlikely futures. The world unfolds forward from the present. It doesn't start at some arbitrary hyper-specific hypothetical future you want and you performing a bunch of mental gymnastics to get there. > "imagine the future, evenly distributed." Yeah that sounds like you just get disqualified if your story is anything but "we all live under UBI and receive our equal rations from the world central government". If you want actual interesting ideas about positive potential futures, change the premise.

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