this post was submitted on 25 Apr 2024
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"A solution in search for a problem" is a phrase used way to much, and almost always in the wrong way. Even in the article it says that it has been solving problems for over a year, it just complains that it isn't solving the biggest problems possible yet. It is remarkable how hard it is for people to extrapolate based on the trajectory. The author of this paper would have been talking about how pointless computers are if they were alive in the early 90s, and how they are just "a solution in search for a problem".
Isn't the "trajectory" that these systems are incredibly unsustainable both economically and environmentally? I'd hope that a machine that uses a few thousand homes' worth of energy to answer a single query would be more useful than "can generate boilerplate code for me" or whatever.
That's going to change in the future with NPUs (neural processing units). They're already being bundled with both regular CPUs (such as the Ryzen 8000 series) and mobile SoCs (such as the Snapdragon 8 Gen 3). The NPU included with the the SD8Gen3 for instance can run models like Llama 2 - something an average desktop would normally struggle with. Now this is only the 7B model mind you, so it's a far cry from more powerful models like the 70B, but this will only improve in the future. Over the next few years, NPUs - and applications that take advantage of them - will be a completely normal thing, and it won't require a household's worth of energy. I mean, we're already seeing various applications of it, eg in smartphone cameras, photo editing apps, digital assistants etc. The next would be I guess autocorrect and word prediction, and I for one can't wait to ditch our current, crappy markov keyboards.