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Comment by deadbabe | Hacker News Reader

I don't think people understand, tokens must never be constrained.

Right now, LLMs are the worst they'll ever be, but imagine what they will be like at the peak: Anything you want to code, coded instantly. Not waiting for code to stream in or wait hours for some agents to crunch through loops and planned: it just appears on the screen instantly like the way a webpage loads. Then imagine it can be done locally, on your device. Need an entire new custom operating system from scratch for some obscure hardware? Done. Here it is.

That's going to be like pure crack to anyone who needs to do absolutely anything. That's going to be like our generation's version of "today's supercomputers will someday be in everyone's pocket".

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Right, every technology is suboptimal in the beginning, but constraints will ever exists, energy and hardware in primis. Aldo you have to factor entropy in regardless, complexity remains a cost

Imagine if people had said one day computer programs had to be more memory constrained because everything uses too much RAM. Madness. We'd never see 128GB of RAM.

This is actually how Jeff Dean, Chief Scientist at Google recommends doing thought exercises to challenge assumptions (watch is recent YX Startup School talk). The end goal isn’t “128GB of RAM”, the goal is “useful effective software”. If for whatever reason RAM was an immovable constraint, a different tech tree would emerge.

The tech tree where we develop tech to have tons of RAM is better and leads to more opportunities than the tech tree where everything is built for only a handful of GB of RAM. We may never have had LLMs if we didn’t go down the first path.

Or maybe we’d have LLMs that fit in a handful of GBs (and we technically already do). It’s hard to tell without completely going down that parallel universe and simulating all the milestones in it, but it’s a fun thought experiment.

There is likely no way to have a decent LLM fit in a handful of GB and be as useful as the frontier ones we have today.

We would be lot better off. I am very weirded that computers are one of the place where waste is sometimes even celebrated. We would be laughed out if we suggested same with say energy in general. Why have walls, we could just have enough space heaters to always push warm air or cool air... Saying we need walls stops us reaching point where we heat or cool ourselves in outdoors constantly.

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