This is not about information but about capital.
Even if we had free access to the weights of the best models in the world: who would be able to run them?
Technology is deflationary. I am holding in my hand a device that would have been a supercomputer 30 years ago. It costed me a couple of hundreds of dollars.
These models and the hardware they are running on will get even more efficient. We are nowhere near the physical limits of what we can achieve.
Not anymore! Well, if you're like Elon and already taking down the bottle of Cuatro Comas from the high shelf, the economies of scale will continue to work in your favor.
But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive. More compute will always get you more: more training, more inference, more parameters, more capacity to build more and better models, more spare capacity to run the slop your models have already built to generate the slop that will succeed it. Back in the dot-com days, or even the "big data" days, you wanted to scale up rapidly but there was a limit: there were only so many customers and they could only produce so much data you could only ingest so fast. In the late 90s, one of the world's most trafficked sites, ftp.cdrom.com, ran on a (single!) dual-processor Pentium Pro system. That was just serving files, and there was certainly room for more CPU oomph to provide more sophisticated services to a huge customer base. But once those customers were served, more compute, storage, and network capacity didn't buy you enough to justify the capex. That is emphatically not the case with AI, and so the incentives for the AI companies are to buy as much compute as they possibly can. What this means in practicing is pre-purchasing capacity at the semiconductor fabs to manufacture chips exclusively for you, and there's only so much of that capacity in the world. Trillion-dollar companies can easily outbid the entire consumer market, and so the incentives for the fabs are now to sell to AI companies at the expense of the consumer market. That's why you're seeing memory prices go through the roof. Modularized RAM for end-user PC builds will soon go the way of the CRT: it will cease to exist as a market product, it won't be manufactured anywhere by anyone. GPUs, CPUs, and storage will soon follow. The only devices end users will be permitted to purchase are all-in-one integrated devices, with CPU, RAM, GPU, storage, and networking either integrated in-chip or soldered on, and they will have just enough capacity to connect to the cloud services the user wants most to use. Most likely, you will be permitted a subscription to such a device, with automatic hardware upgrades at periodic intervals supplied by the manufacturer. If your subscription lapses the device bricks itself. Almost certainly, the OS will be locked down, with no end-user option to install a different one or even run unapproved software.
If reasonably powerful computer hardware for end users exists in this future, it will be available from a single company: Apple. Only they have the leverage to prevent ~100% of manufacturing capacity from going to high-roller, big-tech firms.
> Trillion-dollar companies can easily outbid the entire consumer market
I don't think this is true. I think prices are rising at the consumer and prosumer level because that's what's required for the mass market to collectively outbid the handful of trillion-dollar companies, at least for the limited share of production they can sustainably demand. This process can continue pretty much indefinitely.
> But one of the really neat things about AI is that there is no limit in sight to the scaling incentive.
How you can be so confident? I can imagine there is some limit and with each scaling iteration gain you achieved will decrease so that further iterations would be more and more look pointless
I'm sure a limit will come around eventually. But plans are afoot to build city-sized data centers, and even then that's not enough to sate the AI superscalers' ambitions, hence Elon's talk about putting data centers in space. This is a level of compute scaling unheard of in our lifetime, and we're still a long, long way off from AGI. So while the juice may theoretically not be worth the squeeze at some point, with the current capacity we have there is no end within sight to the incentive to build more. It will take a number of years at least, and who knows how much environmental/economic destruction, before the dropoff in return on capex begins in earnest.
Well it would be anyone that has access to a datacenter to run them. Which is a ton of companies. And those companies will rent out access to those models. And if they do something stupid to screw over consumers, well the whole point is that there would be a bunch of companies that you could use instead.
This mammalian hardware we are running on is merely a bootloader, larva state, don’t take it too seriously. It was good enough to run us and I am grateful I woke up running on it.
This looks really great, more thoughtful than any benchmark that I've seen until now!
I'm curious if you're only interested in scoring frontier models or you would accept submission from custom harnesses? I am working on multi-model harnesses and would love to test them against your benchmark. Do you plan on releasing the tasks publicly?
if cannot merge into 1, at least we can make it a few. 200+ is a waste of resources on so many levels.. so many countries really don't need to exist and have shitty a government...
That can be figured out after the dismantling process :)
My personal utopian take: smaller communities/city-states that would naturally coalesce into more fluid confederations. A lot of these communities could also be distributed and non-local.
I expect there are many people who agree with this sentiment, unfortunately they might not agree on precisely which areas ought to be quarantined. And those who happen to live in the areas you want to quarantine might disagree most vigorously.
Funny i live in a country where the people are the government, and with your knowledge of different country's, the future World-Government would not just be shitty but untouchable mighty. I want really small, face to face responsible governments.
German here, I want the same. We are one species inhabiting a single habitable world in a giant dead void. Nationalism is an idiotic game of no value that causes destruction of resources we need, senseless killing in wars over nothing, and ultimately merely a distraction from everything that’s really important.
Nothing against a Coordinating body like the UN, and really small states (lets call them community's).
But there is no "we are the world, we are the children", future is probably more like US/EU/EAU (east asia union), now you have 3 big blocks fighting against each other (much higher world-ending chance). More power = more bully....
>everything that’s really important.
Yes your right, and talking...even with a enemy should be considered the base for future world-freedom.
No, I'm absolutely aware that we are - as of now - unable to get past the pettiness of nationality and tribalism. Maybe it's so ingrained in us, we'll never get past that, I don't know.
It's just massively frustrating to see what humanity could accomplish if we weren't occupied bashing our heads in over religion, nationality, or color of skin. The planet - the only planet - is dying, people and animals are suffering, and the news are dominated by a particular clown and his circus. It's really unbearable sometimes.
>The planet - the only planet - is dying, people and animals are suffering, and the news are dominated by a particular clown and his circus. It's really unbearable sometimes.
Oh man you speak from my heart, it's like we live on a star-ship, but everyone looks just at their own room instead of steering the ship into a better future.
EDIT: However, as we see a shift from the UN (as a future captain?) to NATO (at least in the so called "West"), i see dark times ahead of us.
> It's just massively frustrating to see what humanity could accomplish if we weren't occupied bashing our heads in over religion, nationality, or color of skin.
Resenting the real world because it doesn't live up to your make-believe fantasy world is pathological. I too can imagine perfect utopian worlds where everybody lives in peace and harmony, but they're just fantasies. Eventually you have to come back to the real world and learn to accept the harsh truths of the reality you find yourself inhabiting.
That's not what I have said. Imagine you have a mentally challenged brother you love dearly, who continues to run head-first against a wall. That's what it feels like. Doesn't mean I'm not aware and accepting of the reality we all live in.
Edit: And honestly, I find it a bit pathological to take the sentence you quoted upfront and not feeling similar resentment against those things. Granted, Humans are a belligerent species, but just shrugging these things away is really not an acceptable stance either.
>Resenting the real world because it doesn't live up to your make-believe fantasy world is pathological.
I dont think world-peace (more or less) is impossible, even if it's more like "Brave New World" instead of "1984".
Or maybe something like the UN with a strong peace-force and WITHOUT a security council but a real and fair democratic decision process.
And maybe the most important point, i have not seen real War-Winners (except the mil.-industrial-blabla) since the 2. World-war....just losers on both sides.
> Eventually you have to come back to the real world and learn to accept the harsh truths of the reality you find yourself inhabiting.
I don't know why I feel so much contempt for people like you. I kinda get it, you want to feel intellectually superior. You're the reasonable one, the adult in the room, etc. but seriously bro, this reality is so fucking harsh. What keeps you going? Why are you still here and going through with it?
All I'm going to say is this is a very shallow analysis, and I expected more from the author of masterpieces like Exhalation. It's a good time to start discussing these topics, so it might still be valuable to publish this as a way to get the debate started.
I am glad you were able to find the root cause and get treatment, and sorry you had to go through this. I hope we will soon remove “psychiatry” from the domain of medicine completely and start addressing actual biological issues directly.
The interesting bit here is that getting to talk to a psychiatrist was one of the main things that "excited" me about getting checked into a psychiatric hospital. My understanding, at the time, was that they crossed the lines between biological and psychological. A psychologist with an MD, if you will. That seemed, at the time, like exactly the kind of inter-disciplinary doctor that I needed.
There was no psychiatrist that I could see at the ER as far as I know. I had to get checked into the psychiatric facility in order to see one. So that was another dimension here where I was enthusiastic about going, and probably made the decision by the ER to send me there easier.
I just can't stand how Gmail is putting a red line under every other sentence that I write (telling me that my writing style is a "mistake") and aggressively nudging me to rewrite it to make it sound more like AI.
Whoever thought such a product would be a good idea should be fired.
Yup, I was just giving them "thumbs down" on every suggestion, but I know I am screaming into the void.
But the fact that this feature exists in its current form (opt-out) means that nobody who tested it internally had the balls to just say "this is fundamentally the wrong direction, we should probably not do this". Don't be evil teehee.
I get the blue squiggly underline with suggestions on how I can improve what I write. I bet if I open up two drafts it will happily suggest contradictory improvements on it's own suggestions.
I'm starting to develop a squiggly line blindness, so be it if grammar in my email suffers :)
I used to care, but I don't anymore. They can read my emails, my code, track what websites I visit and what music I listen to, be my guest. I'd let them read my thoughts directly if we can build technology to do that lol. I realized that ultimately, these corporations are too stupid to do anything of value with all that data, so I don't feel threatened.
You're probably right, I'm an idiot. I just think there's not much we can do about it, so might as well not take it too seriously. At least for the innocuous type of surveillance like reading my emails to learn how to sell me product. Things that you really want to keep for yourself shouldn't really touch the internet at all.
This doesn't strike me as "reading" your emails any more than a router is "reading" your packets when it forwards them. As far as I know, Google employees (even high-ranking ones) can't randomly start going through people's messages-- that's the privacy that matters.
No but they can train a model to know everything about you and sell it.
They actually have precedence in that as it’s their legacy ad business.
I could absolutely see them getting more proactive with their ad business. Something like mortgage brokers want to know you executed an offer on a new home (high indication you will be shopping for a lender). Then that turn into, your employer wants to know you’re talking to other employers. Then of course there’s many more nefarious examples people would consider more invasive but may not even realize it leaked from their email provider.
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