Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago.
Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.
> Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
We can't even predict/understand our current world, yet alone the world in 20 years.
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
>"Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
Back in 2023 I sent myself an email with some predictions about the future and my thoughts on LLMs at the time, good and bad. I can’t remember when it’s supposed to arrive though…
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago. Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
I think the world has changed a lot since the 1980s.
> Premise Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.
So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too
The idea is you tolerate some loss/degradation (which neural networks do) but gain orders of magnitude power efficiency.
Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
What would this world be like?
What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"
What great questions!
These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!
Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!
You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...
That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...
We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...
Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...
You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.