So LLM, modern day AI, you need enough electricity to run a city (or cities). And it can summarise text for you like an intern. You can power an intern with a can o’ beans. Sure an LLM is fast, and it has access to the entirety of the (stolen) internet. But the issue is you build a monstrosity just to do what we can already do. Why is an LLM so inefficient? Well it isn’t built the same as a wet brain, is it. LLM is not necessarily smarter at this point, but it is faster. faster at the expense of bucket fulls of energy. And it uses clean, fast circuitry. Not the slower messy biology structure. With today’s hardware to be as complex as a human brain, you would likely need the power of the sun to run it. Ok, maybe not the sun, but a heck of a lot more energy that we can provide.
OK, so now we can replace all the interns, and their bosses with an energy hungry thinking machine. Why, just because it is faster. Are we really that much in a hurry to summarize that email? It looks more like we are in a hurry to destroy the social and economic glue that holds modern society together for what? So some tech moguls and investors can get rich?
Will we reach a day when nano circuits lower the power cost and and actually outsmart us? I hope not, as the design will likely be totally different. And we know how sentient creatures treat those that are different. Another key difference is that the will think and live at a different time scale. If I could think 1000 x faster than you, what could we possibly have ion common. Surely not our world view nor common goals.
Yes, the future looks is looking pretty sick. That can be read in a good or bad way depending on the generation you come from or whether you will profit or lose from this current industry. But if most lose, we all lose. That is the rule of societies.