I'd especially hammer the point in this case, because clever hacks are very much on topic for Hacker News. They are, in fact, what gave birth to the word hacker and the idea of hacking in the first place. Not only that but it was precisely the clever hacks with no particular utility that were prized most highly!
If you are writing a chess engine you'll want to store hundreds of millions of positions while you search for the best move and at that scale a byte is important because it gets multiplied by an enormous factor.
But that is a totally different problem which requires far fewer bytes to represent. For that problem you are just considering of the valid pieces which made a move and what board that came from. Storing a single move is far cheaper than an entire board state.
Not when you include transpositions, where you arrive at the same position from a different move order, in which case saving board states instead of moves could be very valuable.
There are transposition tables for that though. They don't store the board state actually. For Stockfish, transposition table entries are 10 bytes each, 16 bits of which are the low bits(or high? Can't remember) of a zobrist hash of the board state. The other 48 bits of the hash are used for addressing into the hash table, but aren't stored in it. The rest of the entry will be stuff like the best move found during the previous search(16 bits), the depth of that search(8 bits), evaluation(2 different ones at 16 bits each), and various bits of data like node type and age of the entry(for deciding which entry to replace, because this table is always full). Collisions can occasionally happen, but saving a full board state to eliminate them would cost far too much, since no matter how big you make the table, it'll never be big enough to cache all the board states a search visits.
In Stockfish, there will only be one full-fledged board state in memory per search thread. So the size of the board state is pretty much irrelevant to performance. What's important is reducing the overhead of generating possible moves, applying those moves to the board state, and hashing the board state, which is what magic bitboards are for.
Its not. I know some ex bay area devs who are the same mind, and i'm not too far off.
I think its definitely stronger in MS as my friend on the inside tells me, than most places.
There are alot of elements to it, one being profits at all costs, the greater economy, FOMO, and a resentment of engineers and technical people who have been practicing, what execs i can guess only see as alchemy, for a long time. They've decided that they are now done with that and that everyone must use the new sauce, because reasons. Sadly until things like logon buttons dis-appear and customers get pissed, it won't self-correct.
I just wish we could present the best version of ourselves and as long as deadlines are met, it'll all work out, but some have decided for scorched-earth. I suppose its a natural reaction to always want to be on the cutting edge, even before the cake has left the oven.
> Are they unprofitable because they don't profit on inference, or because they reinvest all of the profit into scaling up?
They are scaling up using VC money, not revenue. As far as profit on inference goes, it's hard to separate it out from training: they cannot, at any given time, simply stop training because that would kill any advantage they have 6 months down the line.
For all practical purposes, you can't look at their inference costs independent of the training cost; they need to keep spending on both if they want to continue doing inference.
> Remember how long Amazon was unprofitable, by choice.
That was a very different scenario - AMZ was not spending their revenue on land-grabbing, they were spending their revenue on long-lived infra, while AI companies now are spending VC investment, not revenue, on land-grabbing.
The difference between spending your revenue on short-lived infra (training a new model, acquiring GPUs) and long-lived infra is that with long-lived infra, at any time, even after 10+ years, you can stop expanding your infra and keep the resulting revenue as profit.
With short-lived infra (models, GPUs), you can't simply stop infra spending and collect profit from the revenue, because the infra reached end-of-life and needs to be replaced anyway.
I don't think most folks think very hard about where most wealth comes from but imagine it just sort of exists in a fixed quantity or is pulled from the ground like coal or diamonds - there's a fixed amount of it, and if there are very rich people, it must be because they took the coal/diamonds away from other people who need it. This leads to catchy slogans.
But it's pretty obvious wealth can be created and destroyed. The creation of wealth comes from trade, which generally comes from a vibrant middle class which not only earns a fair bit but also spends it. Wars and revolutions are effective at destroying wealth and (sometimes) equitably redistributing what's left.
Both the modern left and modern right seem to have arrived at a consensus that trade frictions are a good way to generate (or at least preserve) wealth, while the history of economics indicates quite the contrary. This was recently best pilloried by a comic that showed a town under siege and the besieging army commenting that this was likely to make the city residents wealthy by encouraging self-reliance.
We need abundant education and broad prosperity for stability - even (and maybe especially) for the ultra wealthy. Most things we enjoy require absolute and not relative wealth. Would you rather be the richest person in a poor country or the poorest of the upper class in a developed economy?
I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it. Trade allows specialization which does increase wealth massively, no doubt. And because of how useful specialization is, all wealth creation involves trade somewhere. But specialization is just one component of wealth creation. It stands alongside labor, innovation, and probably others.
>> > The creation of wealth comes from trade, [...]
> I'm not sure to what extent you meant this, but I don't know that I'd agree with it.
At a very foundational level, all wealth comes from trade, even when there is no currency involved.
When two parties voluntarily make a trade, each party gets more value out of the trade than they had before, so the sum total of value after the trade is, by definition alone, greater than the sum total of value before the trade.
Small example: I offer to trade you a bag of potatoes for 2 hours of your time to fix my tractor, and you accept.
This trade only happens because:
1. I value a running tractor more than I value my bag of potatoes
2. You value a bag of potatoes more than you value 2 hours of your time.
After the trade is done, I have more value (running tractor) and you have more value (a bag of potatoes), hence the total value after the trade is more than the total value before the trade.
The only thing that creates value is trade. It's the source of value.
Wow, that's a massive blind spot you've got there.
The value comes from doing the thing. Fixing the tractor creates value. Growing and harvesting the potatoes creates value.
Trading the potatoes for something you value more, yes, also creates additional value. But notice that potatoes have value to you even if you don't trade them for anything.
If you choke on a grape and a helpful volunteer saves your life, they create value. Nothing was exchanged, but they sure as hell generated wealth right there.
Labour and voluntary trade both create value. I wonder what sort of mindset one must have to forget that labour exists.
Also wrong. You can always destroy value by making a mistake. Trading and then realizing you made a mistake, just like investing labour and then realizing you made a mistake, does not create value. Trading is not special in this regard.
Value can be created either way: through labour or trade.
Regardless, your statement that all wealth is created by trade is false.
Yes, but people don't always make voluntary trades. Like staying in a job they hate, because they believe they will find it difficult/impossible to find a better option.
> Yes, but people don't always make voluntary trades. Like staying in a job they hate, because they believe they will find it difficult/impossible to find a better option.
That's still a value assignment: they value eating and paying rent more highly than job satisfaction.
Big question is whether it replaces and then doesn't create new opportunity to make up for those casualties. I'm not sold on this, but there's this part of me that actually believes LLM's or perhaps AI more broadly will enable vast numbers of people to do things that were formerly impossible for them to do because the cost was too great, or the thought of doing it too complex. Now those same things are not only accessible, but easy to access. I made a comment earlier today in the thread about Google's antitrust "win" where things I couldn't formerly have done without sizable and costly third-party professional help are now possible for near-zero cost and near-zero time. It really can radically empower folks. Not sure that's going to make up for all the job loss, but there is the possibility of real empowerment.
I'm genuinely curious about how you and other people with similar outlook see this playing out, as it would kind of provide hope.
Scenario: You are a medium level engineer, who got laid off from a company betting on AI to replace a significant portion of their junior/medium level developers. You were also employing a middle-aged woman, to help with the kids after school and around the house, until you and your wife come back from work. She now needed to be let go as well, as you can't afford her anymore. The same thing happened to a large portion of your peers and work in the same industry/profession is practically no longer available. This has ripple effects on your local market (restaurants, caffes, clothing stores etc).
How do you see this as empowering and a net positive thing for these people individually, and for the society? What do they do that replaces their previous income and empowers them to get back to the same level at least?
Well, if everyone is unemployed there won't be much of a market for these newly AI enabled companies to sell into. Also, in the extreme, you'd have deflation such that it's worth hiring again. This would be very painful.
More likely automatic stabilizers and additional stimulative spending would have to happen in order to fully utilize all the new productive capacity (or reduce it, as people start to work less). It's politically hard to sustain double digit unemployment, and ultimately the government can always spend enough or cut enough taxes to get everyone employed or get enough people to leave the labor force.
I totally share your concern, but I think there's reason for hope assuming it's not Terminator-style AGI that destroys the world (bigger problems than unemployment in that case). Specific to your scenario, it seems like companies are laying people off today in the name of AI efficiency gains (that in itself is debatable, but let's assume that is why they're doing it--they think they can do the same if not more with less). But if you play out those same efficiency gains companies that are in growth mode ought to be able to use those efficiency gains to accelerate product development. So instead of laying people off, companies will be able to build product that much faster because their employees, and engineers in particular, can move so much more quickly. We're so early, though, and c-suite folks are so myopic that the troops haven't yet had time to show them that revenue growth is the real prize of AI/LLM's (and believe me it's always the some troops that show them the way).
On a larger level, I would just ask your fictitious medium-level engineer what are they able to do today, with an AI/LLM, that they were unable to do before? As a very basic example, and one that is already true with existing LLM's, a mid-level engineer who wanted to build an app might've formerly struggled with building a UI for their app. Now, sans designer, a mid-level engineer can spin up an app UI much more quickly, and without the labor of finding and actually paying a designer. That's not to say there's no value left in design, but if you're starting out it's similar to how bootstrap (dating myself here) was an enabler because you were no longer in need of a designer to build a website (was still a huge time suck and pain in the ass though). You can multiple that by a bunch of roles and tasks today because LLM's make it possible to do things you just formerly wouldn't have been able to do on your own.
Last thing is the much more high level. Every time some new tech is introduced there's a lot of concern about displacement. I think, again, that's valid and perhaps moreso with AI. But it does seem to me like major new tech always seems to create a lot of opportunity. It might not be for the exact same people like your mid-level engineer (although I think it might for him/her), but I stay hopeful that the amount of opportunity created will offset the amount of suffering it will cause. And I don't say that in some kind of "suffering is ok" way, but just like revenue growth is the be all end all for so many companies, tech brings change and some suffering is a part of that. Prior skills become less important, new skills are preferred. Some folks adapt. Others thrive. Some are left behind.
If you're still checking in on this thread, and you actually read my diatribe, do you think I'm totally full of it? Again, I don't know that I would bet it would work out this way. Actually I probably would bet on that. But I'm definitely hopeful it will.
AI is pulled out every couple decades and over-hyped. It never matches the hype, then the term AI gets a bad rap, goes away, and the useful stuff gets a new name, like machine learning to shake off the bad connotations of AI. We saw this in the 60's 80', early oughts, and now today.
I remember in college during the late 90's the hype was that CASE tools (Computer Aided Software Engineering) was going to make software engineers irrelevant, you just tell the system your requirements and it spits out working code. Never turned out.
Today, the only way the amount of investment returns a profit if it replaces a whole bunch of workers. If it replaces a whole bunch of workers, well there will be a whole lot less people to buy stuff. So either the bubble bursts or a lot of people lose their job. Either way we are in for a rough ride.
With a few bytes more more you can create an implementation that is a lot easier to understand. Bytes are cheap, developer time isn't.