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Comment by voidfunc | Hacker News Reader

The beginning of the end of human thinking being valuable enough to justify university's existences among many others.

Were in an unprecedented time where the value of knowledge is about to be crushed.

Maybe for STEM. The humanities seems kind of safe to me since there's an element of it which cannot be divorced from human opinion and interpretation. It's not like STEM where the people pursuing the ends are largely fungible and the ends are objective (Heisenberg already believed scientific discoveries were inevitable and it didn't really matter who pursued them, someone would eventually find them)

What is the average value of humanities when the default is to write things with LLMs ? The same with maths.

Nope, it's about to be turboboosted if anything. I myself have already formulated countless proofs (AI assisted naturally) in the last few months, despite: a) not having access to any academic resources b) not being involved in any academic circles. This research is now being employed in my startup, delivering ground shattering results. I actually ran analysis a few weeks ago seeing how much real world capital I would have needed to cough up to fund my efforts so far and it's literally in the _billions_. With less than a $100k in tokens I have been able to effectively generate the value of Apple or Microsoft in the early 2000s. This is only the beginning. Wait until you start seeing single person NVIDIA startups popping up.

This "value" you talk about, is it past tense? A single iphone probably have more compute then the entire world had in the 1970s, would have cost at that point probably hundreds of millions. You will not sell the iphone for that amount today.

Not sure I agree with this take, but we're going to find out either way.

Have you ever heard of an S curve? Things will develop rapidly, then equalize. If they don't, we're at the singularity and I guess the end of time as we know it.

But I guess really bad things happen, cancer, radiation poisoning, torture, people have died in really horrendous ways, and I guess dying from some horrendous AI side effects is possible too. Yay.

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