I agree. And while AI does better when there is less tech debt, at the same time paying down tech debt has gotten immensely cheaper.
I find myself desiring simplifying a codebase just because I still need to make so many decisions and the cognitive load of that has gone up with how much I can do in parallel and still keep track of.
I think we will see good enough local models, excellent cloud models, and then simpler focused models embedded on silicon running on every small device.
And we thought the world was changing fast in the es6 days of JavaScript.
We use to say “web development is changing fast” when a thing changed after two years, and now it looks like it was changing at a snail’s pace compared to AI.
I think fundamentally it is that. The ability to retain information.
Like given a specific task it can do a thing amazingly well, but can it recall a thing. Its memory seems like a giant filing cabinet and it has to go scan like 20 million tokens worth of memory to recover things previously talked about.
Human memory is more graph like, we don’t recall things exactly, but one thing links to another, we create a pattern of a thing, we mark what is important, and overtime what was important degrades or becomes less so.
I feel like what makes it lack intelligence is it never seems to learn. Like it kind of does, but then doesn’t persist once too many other things are learned.
I’m sure they’re probably working on this, but I feel like that is what I want far more than even better models, is a better memory system to recall and forget things that the models work on.
So I sympathize with the idea that a government school paid for by tax dollars, is violating 1st amendment rights.
But it would also violate 1st amendment rights if they took tax dollars and gave it to families who used it on a private religious education.
Or they could arbitrarily let parents pick whatever school they wanted, regardless of what it taught, but that is way too ripe for fraud.
Can anyone think of how a government could respect various religious beliefs while not advocating for one specific one (and let’s presume secular humanism is a type of religious belief), while maintaining tax funded education?
> (and let’s presume secular humanism is a type of religious belief)
Let's not presume that, because it's in no way a religious belief. Pretending that it is means that there's little the government could actually do. Which may, in fact, be the point of this particular lie.
My point is more that as a parent I shouldn’t be forced to pay for an education i wouldn’t give my children.
Secular humanism not being a religion, does have a set of beliefs. It would seem unconstitutional if someone had to pay a teacher to teach my kids the Bible, or the Quran, and many things taught in government schools are counter to beliefs of religion.
I don’t see a solution to the problem that doesn’t cause crazy amounts of abuse other than the government completely gets out of education, or local communities/governments alone support it and the school matches the beliefs of the local community.
None of that seems plausible. So how do you respect the 1st amendment rights of people like the article talks about?
Is there a world where we look back at how AI usage is charged today and we equate it with how we had minutes on AOL and how absurd it seems looking back?
I think without a doubt that will be the case, unless the trend of compute getting better over the last 60 years suddenly stops. It should become less tough to run a local model and our devices should become more powerful.
However I think there is still a significant runway for these models to scale, so there will always be some sort of offering from providers. I can't imagine that our current use of the context window will be how that looks in a handful of years.
Absolutely. LLM providers are likely to be the next telecom providers. Low and steady income, translating to safe dividend income for investors. Most of these companies have no moat, since most LLM implementation strategies more or less converge to the same result.
Absolutely. Tokens will flow like electricity, in the instances when you aren't just paying for electricity to run models locally. The token providers (well, at least the frontier labs) will fight it tooth-and-nail with the example of telecoms being "how to become a commodity" but as long as open models continue they will have no choice.
Energy is very easy to produce cleanly (nuclear, and solar is looking better and better). The barriers to doing so are political and financial, not technical. They will be made worse by having an aged-heavy population, which is less innovative, less willing to invest in the future, and less willing to try new things. And it makes a poorer society, obviously.
Malthus has been proved wrong at every juncture. Lack of children is about to bite us very, very hard.
But remember: the uber-rich are allowing millions to immigrate to the rich world, to prevent precisely this. (I'm not commenting here on whether immigration is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing, simply noting that large-scale immigration brings wages down, and that the low birthrate is consistently stated as its main driver.) Also, remember that paying for all those unproductive old people will consume enormous amounts of wealth, something that didn't apply during the Black Death.
Each marginal person does not produce more environmental benefits than they consume. It's dramatically the opposite. My butt is not a carbon capture device.
It's a problem to the economic model, too, but of course no one cares about more than a couple fiscal quarters in the future. The looming ecological disasters will irreversibly destroy the global economy in some of our lifetimes if nothing happens to stop it pretty soon.
> As the population has grown poverty has decreased.
This is like comparing apples to oranges to find a correlation, and arriving at an incorrect causation.
Falling populations are largely due to better education, specifically of women, as well as integration of women into the workforce, which has been one of the bigger drivers in curbing poverty. The latter is so significant in the west and the far east (double income households mean rising costs of living, meaning SAHM households become unviable in the West for the middle class), resulting in a significant population decrease.
But in places such as the Middle East or Africa, ever increasing populations have only meant even more financial trouble for those economies. Case in point Pakistan and Egypt. In other economies such as India (which I assume is one of the "couple countries" you mentioned), overall birth rates are falling significantly to near replacement level, and in the few states/regions with high birth rates, poverty is rampant and the people reliant on subsidies from other more prosperous regions.
The problem with most of the world is that while we are able to sustain a huge population as a whole globally, most of the population growth is extremely localized, resulting in population sparsity in some comfortable regions (Canada, the US, Central Asia, southern Russia) and population unsustainability in other regions completely unsuited to population growth (sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia, the Middle East).
Just try it for 1 fucking year and then see if you still wish that hell upon anyone.
I swear I'm starting to wonder if that's a take pushed by ultracapitalists so they can have an endless supply of labor and consumers, like the bans on abortion etc.
No, corporations want people without children, since they have more disposable income to spend on the pointless tat they want to sell you, and are willing to work longer hours to make rich people even richer.
I don't think so - children are drivers of consumption and they also reduce the agency of workers by eliminating their financial slack (less ability to jump jobs / take it easy due to higher spending floor e.g. daycare expenses, larger apartment, etc).
If you’re talking about Pete Hegseth, he I think is CREC, and they are post-millenialists, which means they think more so that the earth will get better and better and should build things that last to welcome in Christ when he returns.
I find myself desiring simplifying a codebase just because I still need to make so many decisions and the cognitive load of that has gone up with how much I can do in parallel and still keep track of.
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