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Comment by knodi123 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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.

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

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