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Comment by tqwhite | Hacker News Reader

Did someone say that LLM was the final solution while I wasn’t listening? Am I fantasizing the huge outcry about the terrible danger of AGI? Are people not finding ways to use the current levels of LLM all over the place?

The idea that the trillions are a waste is not exactly fresh. The economic model is still not clear. Alarmists have been shrill and omnipresent. Bankruptcy might be the future of everyone.

But, will we look up one day and say, “Ah never mind” about GPT, Claude, et al? Fat chance. Will no one find a use for a ton of extra compute? I’m pretty sure.

I don’t much dispute any of the facts I skimmed off the article but the conclusion is dumb.

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Ironically that MIT study that made the rounds a few months ago ("Study finds 90% of AI pilots fail" you remember), also found that virtually every single worker at every company they studied was using LLMs regularly.

The real takeaway of the study was that workers were using their personal LLM accounts to do work rather than using the AI implementation mess their companies had shat out.

If bankruptcy does happen to be the future for everyone, then yes, I think there is going to be a lot of "ah never mind"s going around.

If all this went away tomorrow, what would we do with all the compute? Its not exactly general purpose infrastructure thats being built.

Could always mine crypto.

Crypto is another cul-de-sac that is about to go belly up.

My hypothesis is that general computing frameworks are the next big thing. The powerful GPUs have been mostly black boxes for way too long. A lot of clever people will not want to just throw them away or sell them second-hand and will try to find better ways to utilize them.

I might very well be super wrong. F.ex. NVIDIA is guarding their secrets very well and we have no reason to believe they'll suddenly drop the ball. But it does make me think; IMO a truly general GPU (and open + free) compute has been our area's blind spot for way too long.

Some of the participants may go bust but I very much doubt the highly profitable ones like Google, Apple, Nvidia and Microsoft will. There'll be enough demand for existing LLMs to keep the servers busy. Just writing code which works currently is probably enough to justify a fair chunk of the capacity.

Folding@Home?

Increasing electricity prices are going to be its undoing. AI is an environmental disaster in multiple directions.

What will we do with all the compute? Landfills, just like all other e-waste. It's never getting repurposed. I already saw this story play out multiple times in the past. The dot-com bubble led to so much waste--PBXs, switches, PCs, monitors, all thrown on the heap. Oh, sorry, "surplused" then thrown on a heap in the Philippines or wherever.

Personally I think we'll find something better than the LLM algorithm fairly soon, but it will still be using the same GPU type servers.

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