HN

Comments (71)

• maxnevermind
  > Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like?If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, 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 failure on long horizon tasks.
• Menu

  NitpickLawyer
  I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.> Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
• Menu

  rixed
  Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".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.For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
• Menu

  not2b
  Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
• markoutso
  > LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.
• gizajob
  Literally just write “the young lady’s illustrated primer” again. Stephenson already called it.
• divbzero
  Quite an interesting selection committee: Neal Stephenson Gwern Branwen Matt Huang
• Menu

  jdub
  LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
• Kalendermann
  It seems they run out of content so they award you with prizes for feeding the LLM with fresh content. Nice!
• Menu

  newyankee
  there might be 8 billion GPUs in the world by 2040 but they will be controlled by 8 corporations across the world.
• Menu

  mkagenius
  > LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.
• Menu

  orlp
  If there was a continuous 500 watt GPU per person we'd increase energy consumption by more than double.The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.
• Zoo3y
  Asimov's laws of robotics and Herbert's Dune foreshadowed the troubles we are facing now and have been largely ignored. It appears fiction does nothing to guide us when it comes to technology; no matter how prescient or widely read. Consider this when writing your idealist drivel.
• thatgloomyguy
  GPU per person or models working on less computing power
• Menu

  XCSme
  We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
• adventured
  We already know the answer, it's identical to the answer for: what if everybody had UBI.Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.They're not going to create anything.Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.
• Menu

  padolsey
  We humans will all be but API conduits for our respective AIs.
• anon
  undefined
• Menu

  raincole
  > What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?
• Menu

  peter_d_sherman
  >"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.What would this world be like?What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"What great questions!These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
• GalaxyNova
  What will happen when everyone has access to a hot air balloon?
• Menu

  tucnak
  Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
• anon
  undefined
• camillomiller
  I have been in tech for 20 years. i researched, covered, produced analysis, written extensively about innumerable trends. I have always done it with a grain of sane skepticism, but I have been wowed so many times. And yet, for the first time, I see something like this and I can’t utter anything but “oh my effing God”. It’s disturbing to me—to have this incredible technology available, the most incredible I’ve seen ever, and yet feel so empty about it. I just feel a fundamental repulsion. A generation ago the nerds were quirky cool outcasts with enough of a humanistic background, an understanding of the value of culture, or the humility of those who don’t know enough. This enabled them understand that tech is only part of a broader set of values, even though many of them were certainly technological maximalists. With AI another form of tech power has prevailed. It’s tech totalitarism, tech for tech’s sake. The drivers are of course the usual suspects: money and power. Yet there’s more. The resistance, even the most basic skeptical resistance, from the broader public isn’t there. With gen AI the nerd found the gold in the mine: the sudden realization that millions of people just couldn’t wait for the moment a machine could alleviate the curse of thinking. So here they go, merrily and joyously deferring their mind process to a mimicry engine, running back into the warm womb of Plato’s cave.That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.
• HyperAI
  [flagged]