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Comment by akssoni | Hacker News Reader

"AI is expensive" may become invalid in the future when we achieve limitless fusion energy, semiconductors at the atomic level and quantum computers

Edit: added quantum computers

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Also humans are very expensive too, and in many places starting to become a more limited resource. If we look at a huge number of countries currently, many are at risk of population collapses. Japan being the poster child here. If you want more human brainpower you have to convince humans to breed, then dump a huge amount of resources in to that child for nearly two decades. After that you hope and pray they actually want to work at solving the problems in the world instead of playing online all day with their Waifu Replica.

From a historical point of view, computing was expensive and rare, the idea we'd have massive warehouses full of servers connected to a global network was but a dream when I was a child. A single computer (large) computer would have cost as a much as a house and had less power then what you're surfing instagram on in your pocket.

True

> semiconductors at the atomic level

This is definitely being achieved in some respects today. We certainly have the metrology needed to work with this scale now.

I would also add quantum computers to your list. I realize the tortured path this idea has gone down, but even non-exponential speedups like Grover's algorithm could have a major impact on the economics of large-scale optimization & search. IBM is releasing a computer this year that allegedly has 16k+ qubit support.

Yes, quantum computing will replace a subset of classical computing at a cost that is 1/1000th of traditional computing. I have added quantum computing to the list.

There already are dramatically more efficient models in development, I don't expect GPT4 level models to be relegated purely to server racks for long.

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