Comment by beefnugs
Comment by beefnugs 2 days ago
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
Comment by beefnugs 2 days ago
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
> 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
The Law of Accelerating Returns is a better formulation, not tied to any particular substrate, it's just not as widely known.
https://imgur.com/a/UOUGYzZ - had chatgpt whip up an updated chart.
LoAR shows remarkably steady improvement. It's not about space or power efficiency, just ops per $1000, so transistor counts served as a very good proxy for a long time.
There's been sufficiently predictable progress that 80-100 TFLOPS in your pocket by 3035 is probably a solid bet, especially if a fully generative AI OS and platform catches on as a product. The LoAR frontier for compute in 2035 is going to be more advanced than the limits of prosumer/flagship handheld products like phones, so theres a bit of lag and variability.
Nothing to do with Moores Law or AGI.
The current models are simply inefficient for their capability in how they handle data.
> 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
I didn't say winning business, I said winning on cost effectiveness.
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.