7 ms·

Why does that matter? They wont be making at home graphics cards anymore. Why would you do that when you can be pre-sold $40k servers for years into the future

by beefnugs 10mo ago

observationist 10mo ago
Because Moore's law marches on. We're around 35-40 orders of magnitude from computers now to computronium. We'll need 10-15 years before handheld devices can run a couple terabytes of ram, 64-128 terabytes of storage, and 80+ TFLOPS. That's enough to run any current state of the art AI at around 50 tokens per second, but in 10 years, we're probably going to have seen lots of improvements, so I'd guess conservatively you're going to be able to see 4-5x performance per parameter, possibly much more, so at that point, you'll have the equivalent of a model with 10T parameters today. If we just keep scaling and there are no breakthroughs, Moore's law gets us through another century of incredible progress. My default assumption is that there are going to be lots of breakthroughs, and that they're coming faster, and eventually we'll reach a saturation of research and implementation; more, better ideas will be coming out than we can possibly implement over time, so our information processing will have to scale, and it'll create automation and AI development pressures, and things will be unfathomably weird and exotic for individuals with meat brains. Even so, in only 10 years and steady progress we're going to have fantastical devices at hand. Imagine the enthusiast desktop - could locally host the equivalent of a 100T parameter AI, or run personal training of AI that currently costs frontier labs hundreds of millions in infrastructure and payroll and expertise. Even without AGI that's a pretty incredible idea. If we do get to AGI (2029 according to Kurzweil) and it's open, then we're going to see truly magical, fantastical things. What if you had the equivalent of a frontier lab in your pocket? What's that do to the economy? NVIDIA will be churning out chips like crazy, and we'll start seeing the solar system measured in terms of average cognitive FLOPS per gram, and be well on the way toward system scale computronium matrioshka brains and the like.
- delaminator 10mo ago
  > If we do get to AGI (2029 according to Kurzweil) if you base your life on Kurzweil's hard predictions you're going to have a bad time
- blonder 10mo ago
  I appreciate your rabid optimism, but considering that Moores Law has ceased to be true for multiple years now I am not sure a handwave about being able to scale to infinity is a reasonable way to look at things. Plenty of things have slowed down in progress in our current age, for example airplanes.
  - timschmidt 10mo ago
    Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed "fact" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.
    - eru 10mo ago
      During the 1990s (and for some years before and after) we got 'Dennard scaling'. The frequency of processors tended to increase exponentially, too, and featured prominently in advertising and branding. I suspect many people conflated Dennard scaling with Moore's law and the demise of Dennard scaling is what contributes to the popular imagination that Moore's law is dead: frequencies of processors have essentially stagnated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
      - timschmidt 10mo ago
        Yup. Since then we've seen scaling primarily in transistor count, though clock speed has increased slowly as well. Increased transistor count has led to increasingly complex and capable instruction decode, branch prediction, out of order execution, larger caches, and wider execution pipelines in attempt to increase single-threaded performance. We've also seen the rise of embarrassingly parallel architectures like GPUs which more effectively make use of additional transistors despite lower clock speeds. But Moore's been with us the whole time. Chiplets and advanced packaging are the latest techniques improving scaling and yield keeping Moore alive. As well as continued innovation in transistor design, light sources, computational inverse lithography, and wafer scale designs like Cerebras.
- ActorNightly 10mo ago
  Nothing to do with Moores Law or AGI. The current models are simply inefficient for their capability in how they handle data.
- eru 10mo ago
  > What if you had the equivalent of a frontier lab in your pocket? What's that do to the economy? Well, these days people have the equivalent of a frontier lab from perhaps 40 years ago in their pocket. We can see what that has done to the economy, and try to extrapolate.
ActorNightly 10mo ago
I didn't say winning business, I said winning on cost effectiveness.

Why does that matter? They wont be making at home graphics cards anymore. Why would you do that when you can be pre-sold $40k servers for years into the future

observationist 10mo ago

Because Moore's law marches on. We're around 35-40 orders of magnitude from computers now to computronium. We'll need 10-15 years before handheld devices can run a couple terabytes of ram, 64-128 terabytes of storage, and 80+ TFLOPS. That's enough to run any current state of the art AI at around 50 tokens per second, but in 10 years, we're probably going to have seen lots of improvements, so I'd guess conservatively you're going to be able to see 4-5x performance per parameter, possibly much more, so at that point, you'll have the equivalent of a model with 10T parameters today. If we just keep scaling and there are no breakthroughs, Moore's law gets us through another century of incredible progress. My default assumption is that there are going to be lots of breakthroughs, and that they're coming faster, and eventually we'll reach a saturation of research and implementation; more, better ideas will be coming out than we can possibly implement over time, so our information processing will have to scale, and it'll create automation and AI development pressures, and things will be unfathomably weird and exotic for individuals with meat brains. Even so, in only 10 years and steady progress we're going to have fantastical devices at hand. Imagine the enthusiast desktop - could locally host the equivalent of a 100T parameter AI, or run personal training of AI that currently costs frontier labs hundreds of millions in infrastructure and payroll and expertise. Even without AGI that's a pretty incredible idea. If we do get to AGI (2029 according to Kurzweil) and it's open, then we're going to see truly magical, fantastical things. What if you had the equivalent of a frontier lab in your pocket? What's that do to the economy? NVIDIA will be churning out chips like crazy, and we'll start seeing the solar system measured in terms of average cognitive FLOPS per gram, and be well on the way toward system scale computronium matrioshka brains and the like.

delaminator 10mo ago
> If we do get to AGI (2029 according to Kurzweil) if you base your life on Kurzweil's hard predictions you're going to have a bad time
blonder 10mo ago
I appreciate your rabid optimism, but considering that Moores Law has ceased to be true for multiple years now I am not sure a handwave about being able to scale to infinity is a reasonable way to look at things. Plenty of things have slowed down in progress in our current age, for example airplanes.
- timschmidt 10mo ago
  Someone always crawls out of the woodwork to repeat this supposed "fact" which hasn't been true for the entire half-century it's been repeated. Jim Keller (designer of most of the great CPUs of the last couple decades) gave a convincing presentation several years ago about just how not-true it is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oIG9ztQw2Gc Everything he says in it still applies today. Intel struggled for a decade, and folks think that means Moore's law died. But TSMC and Samsung just kept iterating. And hopefully Intel's 18a process will see them back in the game.
  - eru 10mo ago
    During the 1990s (and for some years before and after) we got 'Dennard scaling'. The frequency of processors tended to increase exponentially, too, and featured prominently in advertising and branding. I suspect many people conflated Dennard scaling with Moore's law and the demise of Dennard scaling is what contributes to the popular imagination that Moore's law is dead: frequencies of processors have essentially stagnated. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dennard_scaling
    - timschmidt 10mo ago
      Yup. Since then we've seen scaling primarily in transistor count, though clock speed has increased slowly as well. Increased transistor count has led to increasingly complex and capable instruction decode, branch prediction, out of order execution, larger caches, and wider execution pipelines in attempt to increase single-threaded performance. We've also seen the rise of embarrassingly parallel architectures like GPUs which more effectively make use of additional transistors despite lower clock speeds. But Moore's been with us the whole time. Chiplets and advanced packaging are the latest techniques improving scaling and yield keeping Moore alive. As well as continued innovation in transistor design, light sources, computational inverse lithography, and wafer scale designs like Cerebras.
ActorNightly 10mo ago
Nothing to do with Moores Law or AGI. The current models are simply inefficient for their capability in how they handle data.
eru 10mo ago
> What if you had the equivalent of a frontier lab in your pocket? What's that do to the economy? Well, these days people have the equivalent of a frontier lab from perhaps 40 years ago in their pocket. We can see what that has done to the economy, and try to extrapolate.

ActorNightly 10mo ago

I didn't say winning business, I said winning on cost effectiveness.