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bradley13 3 days ago

Throwing money and compute at AI strikes me as a very short-term solution. In the end, the human brain does not run off a nuclear power plant, not even when we are learning.

I expect the next breakthroughs to be all about efficiency. Granted, that could be tomorrow, or in 5 years, and the AI companies have to stay all at in the meantime.

ryukoposting 3 days ago | parent | next [-]

This is roughly where I am on the matter. If the energy costs stay massive, your investment in AI is really just a bet that energy production will get cheaper. If the energy costs fall, so does the moat that keeps valuations like this one afloat.

If there's a step-function breakthrough in efficiency, it's far more likely to be on the model side than on the semiconductor side. Even then, investing in the model companies only makes sense if you think one of them is going to be able to keep that innovation within their walls. Otherwise, you run into the same moat-draining problem.

simgt 2 days ago | parent [-]

Yeah. Electricity production that we also need for electrifying all of our transports and industry because of climate change. Good luck getting that cheaper.

That said innovation on the model side is more likely to come from a 10B-funded startup that still has some money to spare on the brightest researchers on top of giving them all the data and compute they want to play with.

ryukoposting 18 hours ago | parent [-]

I was thinking about this last night, and I find it amusing. Imagine investing in a company because it has money... your money. That you invested.

Centigonal a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The human brain also doesn't take 6 months to train to a highly productive level. There is a level of time-compression happening here.

Davidzheng 2 days ago | parent | prev | next [-]

the human brain can't run off a nuclear power plant b/c it was too hard for evolution to figure out, but we figured it out. No reason running on nuclear power plant won't give much higher intelligence.

kaashif 2 days ago | parent [-]

But if we could drink a bottle of oil and become 10x smarter for 1 hour, it would be really cool. There just wasn't any use for that in the savannah, or indeed many bottles of oil.

cindyllm 2 days ago | parent [-]

[dead]

sixdimensional 2 days ago | parent | prev [-]

I'm not sure quantum computing is the solution, but it strikes me that a completely new compute paradigm like quantum computing is probably what is necessary - which is orders of magnitude more efficient and powerful than today's binary compute.