alt Hacker NewsIt won't pay off if LLMs efficiency gets good enough to make those data centers obsolete.
It's a huge gamble.
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Or: increasing resource efficiency may encourage even more usage, as happened with coal, oil and photovoltaics.
We haven't even started with a lot of things were we need a lot more compute:
Your real personal agent which knows you and helps you like "good morning elmer2, your calendar invite for dinner is today, you will need to leave at 18:18 if you want to use your normal public transport route per train. I put an alarm in your phone for you"
Agents to agents
Agentic teams.
Finetuned models for everything like Java/spanish coding model.
Very long term research like multiply hours or days or weeks and plenty of these in parallel.
I disagree in a way, part of the reason they can't really succeed at the moment is because it's way too expensive to really deploy at scale for most companies, but even for those AI companies themselves. If they can make business access subsidized/cheap the same way pro/plus/max/whatever plan are for regular users while still being profitable, this can work out. The other solution is if they do reach that "it's so super smart it's reinventing the world every day", but that one is much more of a maybe possibly one day.
What they can't do is the rug pull of pricing like Fable did, hoping for profitability while playing the "it's so super smart" card. It's very profitable, but customer will be very happy to leave for cheaper pasture and that's why the recent news about this or that cheaper chinese models make headlines.
Essentially, the rush now is "if I make it a boring profitable company I'm not worth a trillion AND i'm overshadowed that plays the singularity card even if they're bullshitting"
How about we regulate private corporations so they can't take a "gamble" that's equivalent to a private company giving everyone ferraris on the idea that they will eventually all become formula 1 drivers and give back 10x the ferrari's cost?
Even better, that "gamble" will have to be rescued by taxpayer money.
no - see Jevon's Paradox
Jevon's Paradox ("As efficiency of resource use increases, usage of the resource increases") says otherwise. One things become more efficient, we can use them in lots of ways that would not have been viable before, driving up usage.
Wouldn't improving LLM efficiency make them even more useful across the board, then they can enjoy the nice economies of scale?
The plan is to have LLM working completely autonomously, in that case, the more resources you have, the better. Perhaps people will use local LLM to ask questions, or coders use them for their personal projects, but that's not where the real money is.