That, is also a thought terminating cliche. Sure we want to choose what we spend time on, however, we don't know what experiences will meaningfully contribute to our lives. It is only after we have gone through them that we realize which ones were significant. And these vary for everyone.
We are going around in circles. When we are doing something, we won't be able to do a thousand other things we could be doing. Only the future can tell whether that turns out to be great or not, however, how we react to those experiences is under our control.
Millions of people live about the way you have described, doing manual chores (perhaps out of necessity), and may be they are missing out on the joys of commenting on HN or may be I am indeed missing out on something when I eschew some degree of manual work (I have experienced this).
The point is not automating stuff, it is what do you do when you have automated the boring stuff that is matter - do you just scroll your feed ? Not to mention that some amount of boredom is necessary to make us value the interesting aspect of life.
OP is more correct than you realize. Your judgement of how life was is in the past, while what your life is in the now.
umm, its like the hallmark of adulthood to learn that life is a lot about doing things you don't want to do. There's obviously a spectrum. And I don't mean forcibly through coercion. I mean yeah it sucks to wake up early and clean up and get your exercise in and be accountable to your team or take your kid to basketball practice or feed the cat. Or go out your way to pick up that trash someone else threw out, or let someone go ahead of you in traffic even though you were there first or take the stairs because someone is moving in today and needs the elevator more than you or take your dad to dialysis and listen to him mention the same things 5 times, there and back or not just eat anything you want whenever you want.
I don't know it sounds like you're advocating for doing only things you want to do. Automate everything else. It's all philosophy at this point. Life doesn't really work that way "and it shouldn't" - where shouldn't is wholly in the philosophy category, of course.
You left out washing your clothes in the river, carrying water from the well, butchering a chicken for dinner, walking ten miles uphill both ways and a whole lot of things that you seem to have automated away.
haha you're right! That is the entire nuance of the discussion. There's a line somewhere in there. And it's not as pedantic as it seems. I still do cook my own food. I don't grow it and butcher the meat. But thousands of years of cooking people still cook food. (and not me but people do still grow their own food).
Efficiency and automation isn't some objective linear path toward enlightenment, that's not unreasonable, is it?
And you might say "people cook because they want to". Not exactly given the whole socioeconomic realities. But also "want to" is nuanced. Cooking is a lot of work and there's many parts of it annoying. It's worth it. <insert philosophy on value and how to assess value and is hedonism 'value based' and how can we know>
If a reasonable observer can’t tell the difference that’s when it matters.
I think a lot of people just haven’t seen good quality math proofs or code from an LLM. When I say it’s indistinguishable from the real deal, I mean it. If you haven’t seen it that’s valid, most devs use LLMs like monsters. But when it’s done right, it’s very high quality.
As far as we know (we currently cannot prove or disprove panpsychism) that is true. However, I think it is important to keep in mind that we do not perceive reality as it is. Rather we experience the brain's interpretation of reality. So in that sense, human "reality" is basically what most of humanity agrees that it is.
>> As you can understand, during V3 training, NVIDIA GPUs were still used, but the NVIDIA ecosystem was no longer employed.
Ironic that these large LLMs are eroding Nividia's moat. In the next paragraph he talks about Nvidia digging its own grave. I wonder if Nividia is aware of this and the frequent release cycle is a response to this development ?
> Ironic that these large LLMs are eroding Nividia's moat.
That's not what the quoted part meant. During v3 development they only had access to hardware limited variants of H series GPUs. Those had less interconnect bandwidth IIRC. So, at the time, the low-level wizards that ds employed bypassed the official APIs (i.e. the nvda ecosystem) and hand wrote alternatives to say nccl, to better use those limited GPUs. I remember them publishing some of it as well. It had to do with allocating memory, moving stuff around, etc. Basically bypassing some limitations by going lower than the official APIs support.
There is no eroding of their moat, as long as they sell GPUs. ANd they're selling GPUs like crazy. The moat speaks for itself, if I may :)
They talk about developing and using TileLang which they ported to Huawei's 950 GPUs.
And it makes sense, as these LLMs become more capable in coding abilities - people will use them to develop their own abstractions to work on different HW. You cannot have it otherwise. If SaaS companies get threatened that their SW doesn't have a moat why do you expect Nividia's SW to have moat ? The computing algorithms are not even proprietary. It is only a matter of whether someones cares about it and is committed. This should be encouraging for new AI chip development companies.
The very progress that Nividia enables also has a negative feedback that threatens it.
>> trying to balance autonomy with managing the exploitative nature of modern technology makes me anxious to have kids
This is a legitimate concern and the anxiety is understandable. I think that would make you a much better parent than many. Most often, parents use these as crutches, so as a parent one has to set ground rules (for ourselves) and enforce them.
No tablets/phone access for entertainment till 6-7 yrs - there is simply no reason for this. No unsupervised access till 10-12 yrs.
Use game console like the switch instead of mobile games. Curate stuff for them.
Mostly be involved in how they use technology, discuss with them what it is and what effect it can have in a way they can relate too.
May be for OO not yet for DA. Existential pressure drives better(fruitful) decisons and actions. AI has yet to incorporate that into training/inference.
8. The credit market tied to the data center buildout implodes. The contagion spreads similar to 2008.
It is ironic that people got laid off due to capitol allocation for compute capacity and people will get laid off when there isn't much ROI and things crash.
>> The danger is removing the review systems and pretending the output is expert-level just because it seems to be working correctly.
This is what is happening. In the rush to adopt AI many are abandoning sane engineering principles/processes lest one gets left behind. Only to rediscover them on failure, hoping it is not catastrophic.
They stopped being used as primary weapons because better ones were found - mostly firearms - not because people got bored of it; or reverted to some earlier methods of warfare.
Yes, there is the general class of technologies (warfare, computing ...) and there are particular instances of those for a given time and space and evolve as the landscape changes.
The technology of warfare evolved to better mechanisms, perhaps same with computing.
Bows and arrows are still widely used for hunting all over the world. I was able do freelance work on a relatively low income because of access to ~150lbs of deer meat that came from multiple bow-hunted deer.
This is an interesting question that I haven't thought about, thanks.
What we currently have is a simulacrum of thought - albeit a good one.
Any technology is useful only in the sense that it helps us with solving the problems we are dealing with in that time. When we face issues that a pseudo-thought is not useful in tackling or worse is one of the causes - this will recede in the background.
Beyond that, the implicit assumption in the question is that thinking is the highest form of activity that is useful to us.
I don't know how my thoughts arise but thinking happens when I engage with them. I think what we look for is meaning in our lives and thinking helps us generate/achieve one, whether real or illusory.
I don't know about you, but I can buy bows and arrows at hundreds of sporting goods stores in my local area alone, and I even know of 2 local blacksmith shops that sell swords.
Castles still exist as well, you just aren't invited to them (which was true for us peasants back in the day, too). Trump is still trying to get one built under the ruins of the East Wing, in fact.
But are these actually completely different technologies, and if so, where is the dividing line? Firearms certainly have not decreased in significance, and they're the modern version of a bow, which is simply 2 iterations later in propulsion methods: tensioned string -> high-tension cable -> high-pressure gas.
Are LLMs really going to fall off in significance, or will it just be the nth newest incarnation of LLMs?
The function of what an LLM does (generative language) is what people seem to take issue with, but the function is here to stay, even if the next iteration has a different name or method.
The difference is in what other enabling technologies do you need to achieve it. Advanced technologies sit on a pyramid. One can build a bow and an arrow from sticks, string and rock. For reliable firearm we need chemistry and advanced metallurgy.
My view wasn't whether generative language is here to stay or not but rather will it continue to be a significant thing or not.
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