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Comment by metalcrow | Hacker News Reader

> Presumably performance on the level of the current frontier of AI would be achieved in short order and the ceiling would only continue to advance from there

That's an enormous presumption! You're saying that even in the theoretical case that frontier research is halted but efficiency isn't, we could do better then the frontier and reach world-changing AI in 30b parameters at home-scale labs?! If that's true then we can just give up now: the world as you know it is going to end in around a decade and billions are going to die, there's nothing we can do. But I don't think that's true. Advancing the frontier seems to take a massive amount of compute, data, and parameters: miniaturization only happens afterwards.

If you're right then I concede. It doesn't matter what we do, regulations or not. But if I'm right then regulation can do something and in theory help bring a better future.

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> frontier research is halted but efficiency isn't

Why are you treating those as if they're separate things?

> Advancing the frontier seems to take a massive amount of compute, data, and parameters: miniaturization only happens afterwards.

This is just completely wrong. Don't mistake the path by which something happened (or appeared to an outsider to have happened) for a fundamental truth.

The frontier labs build massive models because if you're competing and you have a lot of cash and brute force is a viable option then it's easy and predictable. But the fundamental research itself doesn't in general require scale (certainly not entire datacenters) and models at any given capability level keep shrinking.

I keep repeating myself at this point but the human brain is on the order of 20 watts. That's a fraction of a single datacenter GPU! So again, would you have us destroy all chip fabs and ban all biomedical research?

> Why are you treating those as if they're separate things?

Because they are? You haven't explained at all your belief that they are the same.

> This is just completely wrong. Don't mistake the path by which something happened (or appeared to an outsider to have happened) for a fundamental truth.

So it's completely wrong but it's only what has happened so far? You're repeating yourself but you're not listening to my responding to your exact points. I literally responded to your claim that "would you have us destroy all chip fabs and ban all biomedical research?" In the last post.

To both points, you appear to broadly lack technical understanding of the field. You are assuming that how things appear to you reflects how they are at a lower level.

A chronological review of the architectures of the best open models over the past 3 years should immediately make the problem clear to you. (If you really refuse to put in any effort then perhaps just dump this thread into a frontier model rather than responding.)

> I literally responded to your claim that "would you have us destroy all chip fabs and ban all biomedical research?"

I don't see it? It's a rhetorical question to drive home the point about the human brain. Chip fabs and biomedical research are both viable pathways to more efficient hardware. Thanks to biology we know what's possible. If you outlaw something but don't effectively cut off all the pathways to it then someone will still do it if it's profitable.

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