Probably lots of tracking behind the scenes requiring all the js

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.

This take is unfathomable to me. How are LLMs not massively revolutionary, despite them not being infallible? This comment reminds me of there being competitions for finding useful purposes for electricity when it was first discovered. Imagine talking about the usefulness of LLMs while thinking that LLMs in 2026 just compress a few TB of data into a set of weights and that's all they work with lol.

Wow, you really do not understand them. The 'problem' with LLM AI is the weak educations of the people that cannot grasp their subtle multidimensional nature, and how that creates a requirement on the users' behalf to understand the language they use to communicate in a similar manner as numbers are to algebra. LLM AIs are literally literature calculus but that truthful phrase flies right over the majority's heads.

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

"If we talk about just LLMs"

In general we don't, as the "chatbots" already have way more capability than "just" being able to work with text, which "just" means encoding and processing real world information and lot's of it.

For example I just fixed the gearing of my bicycle by dropping some pictures into claude and it gave me a step by step guide to fix it.

"LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all"

And I cannot understand how that can be "all" as it means giving this power to every human, not just the few in the position to hire expert knowledge workers. Steam engines gave us the capability to let machines do the hard labour. Now with better engines and tools, AI will give robots the capability to do allmost anything humans can do. If that is not revolutionary then I don't know what is.

The main reason we humans got to the top of the food chain was because we are expert knowledge workers, able to transform the world around us to our needs.

"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."

So again, just limiting this debate to a simple fixed model - then no, not too useful - but a model that can take notes and at some point reliable clear up it's context - that is a whole different story.

And it has been repeated often enough, but AI does not need to be perfect - it just has to be as or more reliable than us humans. Because yes - AI does make misstakes - but so do humans.

agent's failures on long horizon tasks

We've moved from LLMs being able to work on a task for about 2 minutes to about 2 hours in the last 18 months, and that's mostly limited by the context window size filling up. In 14 years time I don't really see a reason why that wouldn't have extended a time frame that's effectively continuous forever, or at least a ceiling that's indistinguishable from that.

The question really becomes "why would we want that?". The main reason you'd want an AI that can focus on a task forever is to completely remove the human from the loop. That's something we should be cautious about.

> LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all.

I feel like this is incredibly simplistic, and if you changed "LLM" to "computer" or "internet" and went back decades, it's highly likely you'd read the exact same takes in the newspaper back then about those things.

It's also at the same time downplaying just how valuable "nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers" could be, just like computers did for us "highly motivated expert knowledge workers" in the first place. Or computers isn't a "foundational technology" either?

Computers were made and automated lots of work, even though it was still us operating those computers and making and running those automations. But eventually computers took over and running so much of the world.

Now LLMs are automating the computers themselves. This is a whole new layer that we never had before, not in this amount or with this much availability. It is not "not foundational".

> it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes

Why? I'm not an expert, but from my understanding, there say species that function well in their ecological niches with significantly smaller cognitive capacities. And we already have autonomous cars and drones navigate and function reasonably well. So I don't see any reason to believe it's impossible. And even if terabytes aren't sufficient, there's no real barrier to increasing capacity.

The thing that would change it a lot is that people would start trading away their GPUs, because some people would get vastly more economic use out of them.

Also, way more centralization, with all that logic pushed to a few AI vendors

Absolutely untrue. LLM will be the automation force of everything. It will connect and orchestrate our entire society. It will be a much bigger impact that any other revolution in the past. Our lives will be unrecognizable in 10 years from now.

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.

I finished reading it recently, too. I thought it was quirky, delightful, and obviously exaggerated for entertainment and contemplation purposes. I've recommended it to a bunch of people, too!

It triggered one of my favorite weird activities: after reading a book that I fully enjoyed and feel was completely "worth it," I give myself a few days to float on that happy feeling. Then, I go look at specifically only one and two star reviews. And laugh. Man, some people hated that book!

Note that otherwise, as a rule, I basically never read reviews of entertainment, restaurants, hotels and similar before nor after. I'm just not interested.

Haven't read that one yet, but his Children of Time series is sooo good.

Yes, that book is a stark reminder (or prediction).

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! :)

> not much have changed.

So much have changed. The way we shop, travel, navigate a town, the way we socialize, receive information. My formative memory is during the transition from computers are a furniture piece and internet a thing you do to being on your pocket with constant high speed connection and the difference is incredible.

I was also part of the people that thought everyone having access would turn out a lot better than it ended up being. I think the issue is not that it did not change much, is that good changes got offset a bit by a lot of very bad outcomes.

No comment on the distribution and concentration part, that one I agree.

> Turned out: not much have changed.

I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.

I was thinking of something similar.

Waxing poetic, it's been a while since the wheel was invented and we've gone through a lot since then, yet the rich are still rich and the poor are still poor and the loved are still loved and the loveless still loveless.

Would one GPU data center/person make a difference? Probably not, but it could be quite fun to have your own personal genie. And then we get used to it.

Still, I'm not sure if most people care to make the distinction between technology (a rocket promising to reach for the stars) and the human condition (has it ever changed since the dawn of time?).

> Turned out: not much have changed Changed a lot, I am getting to know what a random person living some where in the world think about what change it has brought

> 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.

We are far short of everyone having access to the internet.

I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.

Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.

Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.

If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative. Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't). I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.

It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.

The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.

If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.

Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.

Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself. While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects. (And of course training/model optimisations)

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).

I think personalized suriveillance and manipulation (thought control, manipulating people through filtering of content they receive) on a level any dictator would drool over can be gotten for a fraction of 1 GPU per person.

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.

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.

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.

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.

It's a story writing competition...

Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.

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

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.

500 watts continuous isn't realistic, unless you foresee a 24/7 digital shadow society where AIs interact continuously without user input.

> 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.

So how is it different from now, you can name any industry for example

“In our story contest, we ask people to imagine the future, evenly distributed.”

> 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.

Or : "The young GPU's illustrated human primer"

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.

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.)

> 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_... )

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.

One interesting formulation is that humans are the sex organs of AI.

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…

> What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?

Did you even read the prompt

Its a sci-fi story prompt. Do non tech bros not understand the concept of fiction?

And? Virtually everyone in the world has internet

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.

This may be the most HN comment I've ever read.

What a fantastically bleak world view.

The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back

There have been studied and experiments with UBI which contradict what you say.