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Comment by petercooper | Hacker News Reader

Claiming limitations when it comes to technology usually proves short-sighted. The quotes about five computers, 640k of memory, etc, are not formally comparable but they give the anecdotal hint that limitations will always be beaten.

The point made in this article surrounds current architectures and their limitations. The conclusion that more than 16 cores makes no sense might well be a good conclusion for now, but "more than 16 cores may well be pointless" is by no means a conclusion for the long or even mid term.

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"they give the anecdotal hint that limitations will ALWAYS be beaten."

Don't you mean usually? I haven't seen the big break throughs in AI that were expected. I haven't seen a solution to the halting problem, etc, etc.

Because, by definition, when an AI breakthrough is achieved, it's no longer AI...

that's a good soundbite, but it's nonsense.

AI hasn't lived up to the promises made a few decades ago.

* 1958, H. A. Simon and Allen Newell: "within ten years a digital computer will be the world's chess champion" and "within ten years a digital computer will discover and prove an important new mathematical theorem."[53]

* 1965, H. A. Simon: "machines will be capable, within twenty years, of doing any work a man can do."[54]

* 1967, Marvin Minsky: "Within a generation ... the problem of creating 'artificial intelligence' will substantially be solved."[55]

* 1970, Marvin Minsky (in Life Magazine): "In from three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being."[56]

I like how you found 2 people who support your argument, but there is a gap separating predictions from promises. Many classical definitions of AI have been surpassed, but because people are still better at a verity of tasks we say we don't have AI.

PS: A digital computer is the worlds chess champion or would be if we let them compete. Making a useful captia is hard, but computers don't compose poetry so we can still say we don't have AI.

poetry is a bad example. A computer still can't translate from one language to another at a level anyone would trust for something important.

Computer translations fall in between a freshman HS language student and an expert. I am not going to trust it for diplomatic negotiations, but I have still used it for some verifiable tasks. Voice to text translations also fit in this context if you can't type then it's ok, but if you need a high level of accuracy then use a person. Which IMO describes the state of most computer AI. It's picking stocks and rejecting parts but I still want a real doctor.

exactly, AI hasn't lived up to the promises which was my original point. Remember I was responding to this quote,

"they give the anecdotal hint that limitations will ALWAYS be beaten."

Limitations will not always be beaten.

Perhaps I should have said numerical limitations or limitations of scale, rather than limitations of technique.

"The conclusion that more than 16 cores makes no sense might well be a good conclusion for now, but "more than 16 cores may well be pointless" is by no means a conclusion for the long or even mid term."

From the article: "But, to my knowledge, these die-stacking schemes are further from down the road than the production of a mass-market processor with greater than 16 cores."

The article is pretty clear that "more then 16 cores may well be pointless" is for now.

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