GPU World

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• Hacker News
• Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.

  To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.

  Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.

  So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.

  But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.

  The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?

  by ezoe
• It's "what if" thought exercise, doesn't need to be an accurate (or realistic) prediction.
  by lnrd
• Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
  by tucnak
• Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.

  And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.

  by avaer
• > I wonder if they will accept a play.

  We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.

  (Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )

  by gwern
• > 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.
  by markoutso
• 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.

  by adventured
• There have been studied and experiments with UBI which contradict what you say.
  by Synaesthesia
• The 18th century called, they want their Malthusianism back
  by nylonstrung
• This may be the most HN comment I've ever read.

  What a fantastically bleak world view.

  by noir_lord
• We have a quite shitty but effective version of basic income (not universal) today in many countries. People don't generally starve or freeze to death anymore. They get shelter and healthcare too. We might not give people free money directly in all cases. But we are already paying for everyone to be taken care off. Going from there to a UBI isn't as much of a leap as many people seem to think it is.

  The working population only actually works part of their life. The rest of their life they are provided for as well. In fact, in many modern countries the amount of people that are allowed to vote and yet is not considered part of the working population is approaching 50% or actually more than 50%. There are lot of retired people, students, stay at home parents, chronically ill/disabled, etc. that are not considered to be pariahs in most societies and yet they don't really perform any payed labor. They are not counted as unemployed. And plenty of them actually do very useful things of course.

  And if you start looking at what it is people actually do for money these days, things get weirder. Sure, they get paid. But there are some seriously weird things people do for a living. A lot of which you might label as redundant, frivolous, or so abstract it's questionable what the actual benefit is. Arguably, a lot of the work that gets done unpaid by the non working class is a lot more useful and essential than quite a disturbingly large amount of stuff done by the working classes these days. A lot of those working the hardest doing the most useful things get paid the least.

  You could label a lot of "work" as busy work for people to give them an income. It's not all that consequential if they stop doing it for a while. The lockdowns a few years ago were instructive in how minimal the disruption was when masses of people stopped showing up for that work. Many people doing actual real work of course never stopped working. But many of us were just confined to our home office where we got to sit on zoom calls, bake bread, or do whatever it was we did to keep ourselves busy. While still getting paid.

  I think that was a little glimpse of the future. Minus the restrictions on movement and freedom. We'll still do stuff for each other. And some of us will still work quite hard. It was never about the money.

  by jillesvangurp
• >"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"... :-)

  by peter_d_sherman
• Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
  by left-struck
• Quite an interesting selection committee:

    Neal Stephenson
    Gwern Branwen
    Matt Huang

  by divbzero
• Right? I'd submit something just for the chance of lodging an idea in the head of Stephenson or Gwern.
  by jephs
• 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."

  by jdub
• Nah, someone imagined this before you. Be more original.
  by fangspire
• It's a story writing competition...
  by koolala
• From Dune by Frank Herbert. See "Butlerian Jihad" [1]

  [1] https://dune.fandom.com/wiki/Butlerian_Jihad

  by qrios
• As far as I understand the backstory of the jihad this rule was caused not by machine minds being bad but (some) humans are very shitty.
  by blkhawk
• 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.
  by not2b
• Specialized chips like what cereberus is building combined with small models can give great result in the long run, but at the pace AI is growing it's not very practical yet.
  by sriniwasx
• I think personalized suriveillance and manipulation (thought control, manipulating people through filtering of content they receive) on a level any dictator would drool over can be gotten for a fraction of 1 GPU per person.
  by tomaskafka
• Right, if everyone in the world has a GPU we would have solved so many problems with power generation and... I'm not going to do the math but I think we'd be mining asteroids too? I'd probably use it as a bookend at the point.
  by threetonesun
• Analog AI/approximate computing? There's research into it, worth looking at if you're interested.

  The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.

  by avaer
• Most of the energy consumption comes from moving data between memory and compute units rather than the math itself. While HBM stacked on a silicon interposer was a signification efficiency improvement over traditional DDR, there's still room for improvement. The high energy costs will drive this further, e.g. near-memory/in-memory compute (PIM) or tighter 3D packaging and possibly optical interconnects. (And of course training/model optimisations)
  by keysersoze33
• 8 biillion * 1400 watts = 11.2 terawatts

  current global average electricity production = approximately 3.6 terawatts

  But then again these systems do not use 1400 watts all the time. We would probably have much more then 11.2 terawatts demand if all humans turn on all their electrical consumers at the same time.

  by i5heu
• Compared to 20-30kw spend on cruising the highway in a car (considerably higher for older ICEs) 1.4kw does not really seem to dent the energy consumption.

  Especially if cognitive technologies mean that we need to travel less (eg communiting to work, or ineffecient supply chains).

  by tossandthrow
• 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".

  by rixed
• I think the idea of "even distribution" is dangerous, as it often assumes equal preferences and views of what needs to be distributed.

  Do we want equal outcomes or equal opportunities. What constitute and outcome and an opportunity.

  Even in something as harmless as giving people equal access to e.g. internet, we're assuming that the cost of access to internet < than the cost of their alternative preferences.

  If people want to live nude in the jungle, that should be their prerogative. Let's just turn it around for a second, where a nude-jungle-living population was majority, and had the ability to force their will on you. Would you like for them to make nude-jungle-living a universal and equally distributed circumstance, in alignment with their preferences? (I wouldn't). I want access to more and "better" compute. I'm willing to sacrifice my time to get access. With my current compute spend, I'd estimate that roughly 1 hour of work per week, goes to purchase compute and related equipment.

  It's only fair that those who have worked hard to manifest this compute in the world, also want something in return. I too want something in return for the hours I spend producing things that people want.

  The idea that people have a "claim" on things I produce, purely as an artifact of existing, is completely bonkers.

  If you want to give something to others, use your free will to do so. I do so, on occation. And I don't expect others to. But I do expect others to leave me and the things I produce alone, unless we've agreed to transact.

  Sorry, but these socialist ideas of "those who make things are evil and only does so to get power over others" are so fucking tiring. "The world would be a better place if we just distributed x equal to my preference (y)". Fuck off. I don't want your Lada. But by all means go out and exchange the things YOU produce, for free internet for others. Sounds terrific. Don't force me to do the same. I have other but equal ideas of how to make the world a better place.

  by prolly97