On the other hand, as long as the entire internet goes down when Cloudflare goes down, I'll be able to host everything there without ever getting flack from anyone.
You're ignoring the fact that going outside to protest wasn't something you could just decide not to do, just like buying groceries. BLM protests and gathering indoors for fun are not equal.
On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure.
Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achieve anything. Coincidentally, our own progress has also been tied to the rate of shrinking of our toys.
Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as sophisticated as real ones."
I do think we probably need a new hardware approach to get to the human level, but it does seem like it will happen in a relative blink of an eye compared to how long the brain took.
But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train, and are forever distracted. Our logic-based processes will keep getting smaller and less power hungry as we figure out how to implement them at even lower scales, and eventually we'll be able to solve problems with the same building blocks as evolution but in intelligent ways, of which LLMs will likely only play a minuscule part of the larger algorithms.
I think current LLMs are trying to poorly emulate several distinct systems.
They're not that great at knowledge (and we're currently wasting most of the neurons on memorizing common crawl, which... have you looked at common crawl?)
They're not that great at determinism (a good solution here is that the LLM writes 10 lines of Python, which then feed back into the LLM. Then the task completes 100% of the time, and much cheaper too).
They're not that great at complex rules (surprisingly good actually, but expensive and flakey). Often we are trying to simulate what are basically 50 lines of Prolog with a trillion params and 50KB of vague English prompts.
I think if we figure out what we're actually trying to do with these things, then we can actually do each of those things properly, and the whole thing is going to work a lot better.
>But we don't even need a human brain. We already have those, they take months to grow, take forever to train
This is a weird argument considering LLMs are composed of the output of countless hours of human brains. That makes LLMs, by definition, logarithmically worse at learning.
Not all artificial neurons are LLMs. Machine learning can be applied to any kind of large data set, not just human prose, and will start finding useful patterns before a human brain has time to learn how many fingers it has.
We use logic to design our technology, but evolution does it by literally shaking all the atoms into place, no design involved. Our brains were created randomly.
It appears logical, but it falls under the same threshold. We say it has function, which is logical, but its used for something we could or may not have planned for. That's evolution. The logic is a pretext.
Development is often divided into 80% known unknowns and 20% unknown unknowns. AI can only help with one of those, and it's the one that takes the least amount of time to complete.
Research and thinking is always going to be the bottleneck.
I believe this is true for literally anything that replaces practice. We're meant to build muscle memory for things through repetition, but if we sidestep the repetition by farming it out to another process, we never build muscle memory.
or make them legal, then they'll be optimized for shareholder profits, and become boring as fuck, and nobody will want them any more than people want pumpkin spice lattes
While I agree that it's very easy to create too much code, I think one of the bigger sources of debt we face as an industry is poorly fitting our tools to the tasks at hand. Sure, a SQL database is nice if you need to query the data in undefined ways in the future, but there's a vast set use-cases that won't benefit from all the features that come with it and could bankrupt you if you decide it needs to scale.
I wonder how many servers Company A and Company B are running.
Both of those have trillions of dollars more in counter-initiatives, and that was before the global democratic backsliding started snowballing. I don't think it's going to happen this century.
