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Comment by dist-epoch | Hacker News Reader

There will be a single app in the future: a generative AI app which will synthesize pixels on the screen depending on what you are doing.

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That will be absurdly wasteful of power. My calculator runs using the power of ambient light in a comfortably lit room. There are some things that an LLM is well-suited for, but c'mon. Unless electricity and hardware becomes free, I just don't see your prediction coming true.

I don't think they mean the LLM will literally be controlling the pixels, it will just be writing the high level code that eventually controls the pixels.

I actually meant the LLM controlling the pixels.

Seems highly inefficient, but so was every move from assembler -> C -> .NET -> JavaScript -> Electron.

Compare your calculator with the Electron-like based on included in Windows or with sending a calculator query to Google. The latter still exists despite orders of magnitude more energy usage.

Running neural networks will become cheaper too, all computers will have hardware accelerators for them.

You can replace "LLM" with "electron" and your post will be equally true, yet here we are.

Historically, I don't think an absurd waste of power is gonna dissuade most people from throwing LLMs at everything they can.

I've already seen functions like LessThanOnePage(text) that combine a long prompt + freeform text in a slow LLM that basically says "will this text fit on one printed-out page". Takes several minutes to run, but requires a tiny fraction of the brainpower required to efficiently implement the function.

Kind of seems like a new level or generation of high-level (slow to execute but fast to code) vs low-level (fast to execute but slow to code) programming.

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