I’m imagining a steampunk dystopia in 50 years: “all world production stopped, LLM hosting went down. The market is in free-fall. Sam, are you there?”
Man that cracks me up.
Man that cracks me up.
There is a very interesting thing happening right now where the "llm over promisers" are incentivized to over promise for all the normal reasons -- but ALSO to create the perception that the "next/soon" breakthrough is only going to be applicable when run on huge cloud infra such that running locally is never going to be all that useful ... I tend to think that will prove wildly wrong and that we will very soon arrive at a world where state of art LLM workloads should be expected to be massively more efficiently runnable than they currently are -- to the point of not even being the bottleneck of the workflows that use these components. Additionally these workloads will be viable to run locally on common current_year consumer level hardware ...
"llm is about to be general intelligence and sufficient llm can never run locally" is a highly highly temporary state that should soon be falsifiable imo. I don't think the llm part of the "ai computation" will be the perf bottleneck for long.
I've often thought that local power generation (via solar or wind) could be (or could have been) a viable alternative to national grid supply.
For coding, creativity is not necessarily a good thing. There are well established patterns, algorithms, and applications could reasonably be construed as "good enough" to assist with the coding itself. Adding a human language model over that to understand the user's intents could be considered an overlay on the coding model.
I confess that this is willful projection of my hope to be able to self-host agents on affordable hardware. A frontier model on powerful hardware would always be preferable but sometimes "good enough" is just that.
I wouldn't pay for it for myself but I can see employers considering it.
Imagination, either the first or last thing to die in 2075.
Is it so different?
But what about when LLMs go down and a good chunk of a whole generation won't even know how to think, when the remote system goes down? (Is the ability to think "the engine" of self and agency in this metaphor?)
We are building a wildly irresponsible context to exist in.
“So sorry, we can’t read the WiFi signal from your generator. We don’t know how much to tax you for the emissions. Sadly, we can’t allow it to start.”
The story writes itself.