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Then you lose the part where you get free computational power


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Computational power < network connectivity

If we lost a few decades of processor improvements, it would be about as parent noted.

If we lost worldwide connectivity or all undersea backbones between some terrestrial networks... it would be civilization-altering.


Truly unlimited free compute power?

Something something strong claims.

That must be the closest I've seen to a self refuting claim on here in a long time. Would love to hear more about how you do either the truly unlimited part or the free part practically.


To spare, you say? I want to use that computing power for my own purposes. I suddenly decided I want to multiply gigantic matrices.

computing power

Computing power is nothing without a high Delta-V rocket under your backside.

Well, we do have all of that computation power. The question for what do you want to use it? What kind of endeavors do we have for which we could use all of that power? The better question would be, what would the world look like today if we didn't have all of that computation power.

Well people certainly are good at finding new ways to consume compute power. Whether it’s mining bitcoins or training a million AI models at once to generate a “meta model” that we think could achieve escape velocity. What happens when it doesn’t? And Sam Altman and the author want to get the government to pay for this? Am I reading this right?

Well, okay, but the point is that computing power will catch up to 1b^2 a lot faster than 2^1b.

I meant the large computing power part

Our local system has a definite cap on processing power. Eventually it would be necessary to find more power to do more thinking.

You're not going to have much computational capability especially given the mass.

Computational power is not a constant.

There is a limit to the cost of computational resources, the cost would decrease until a certain limit and then that cost will apply until the heat death of the universe.

It's also very, very easy to run into compute limits on the free tiers of Wolfram Cloud and even Wolfram Alpha.

It's only meaningful for traditional computing if you can build circuits orders of magnitude more efficient than we can currently.

Good thing that computing power also scales exponentially with time then.

But don't those go away with enough compute resources?

What makes you think it would require 51% of all computational power? That would only be true if there were no other valuable things to compute, which is very unlikely to be the case.

So it can compute while you don't compute
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