Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
by ufmace on Tuesday August 12, 2025 @03:42PM
(#44880999)
I agree. There's also the point of hardware dependance.
From all we've seen, the practical ability of AI/LLMs seems to be strongly dependent on how much hardware you throw at it. Seems pretty reasonable to me - I'm skeptical that there's that much out there in gains from more clever code, algorithms, etc on the same amount of physical hardware. Maybe you can get 10% or 50% better or so, but I don't think you're going to get runaway exponential improvement on a static collection of hardware.
Maybe they could design better hardware themselves? Maybe, but then the process of improvement is still gated behind how fast we can physically build next-generation hardware, perfect the tools and techniques needed to make it, deploy with power and cooling and datalinks and all of that other tedious physical stuff.
Re:Why Are There So Many Rationalist Cults?
by astrange on Wednesday August 13, 2025 @06:50AM
(#44886850)
I think you can get a few more gigantic step functions' worth of improvement on the same hardware. For instance, LLMs don't have any kind of memory, short or long term.
From all we've seen, the practical ability of AI/LLMs seems to be strongly dependent on how much hardware you throw at it. Seems pretty reasonable to me - I'm skeptical that there's that much out there in gains from more clever code, algorithms, etc on the same amount of physical hardware. Maybe you can get 10% or 50% better or so, but I don't think you're going to get runaway exponential improvement on a static collection of hardware.
Maybe they could design better hardware themselves? Maybe, but then the process of improvement is still gated behind how fast we can physically build next-generation hardware, perfect the tools and techniques needed to make it, deploy with power and cooling and datalinks and all of that other tedious physical stuff.