• 2 Posts
  • 113 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 5th, 2023

help-circle






  • The only solution is to make sure they can’t read data you don’t want shared.

    Isn’t that the appropriate guardrail, then? LLM chats and agents and whatever need to be contained with external permissions settings that the LLMs simply do not and can never have the power to override.

    In a normal customer service setting with human agents, there are still plenty of examples of what a human agent simply doesn’t have the power to do. Often, they’ll need to escalate to a manager to do things like process refunds not just because they weren’t given social permission to do so, but because they weren’t given technical permissions to do so. LLM agents need to be contained in the same way. Any decent use of agents, human or software, requires carefully designed processes and permissions extrinsic to that agent’s own decisionmaking abilities to make sure that agents don’t do something bad for the company.







  • Those AI servers are probably a discounted cost of around 3-5k per U (I’m probably low in this estimate but I have a really hard time believing they’re actually paying $20k+ per GPU),

    They’re arranging 72 Blackwell GPUs into each server rack, at around a price of $3 million, in a cabinet that is 2236mm x 600 mm x 1068mm. That’s approximately a 7 square foot footprint, so about $430,000 per square foot of server. There’s obviously a need for spacing between servers, but you’re basically underestimating by an order of magnitude.


  • In the current environment? Apple shielded itself from price hikes by component suppliers by locking up capacity early. There’s a reason why their CEO came up through the supply chain rather than software or design.

    The memory Apple is putting in its devices today are largely priced at prices negotiated years ago. It got deals on CPUs and GPUs of their own design, fabricated by TSMC, packaged with Samsung-fabricated memory in System-in-a-Package form, at volumes that make them nearly impossible to say no to, under contracts that are probably bulletproof even as TSMC and Samsung have others clamoring for their capacity at higher prices.

    The A18 Pro in the MacBook Neos is made on TSMC’s N3E node, which started production in 2023 and was probably under contract by 2022. The AI boom largely started happening after, and the memory/storage chip crunch didn’t seem like it would be a problem until 2024 or so.

    In an environment like this where there are capacity shortages and companies bidding up the price to absurd levels, companies like Apple are exactly who you’d expect not to be thrown around by price hikes.






  • AI has an interesting economic trait in that it’s very, very expensive to deploy, and made very fast progress from 2022 to 2024. That caused investors with money to believe that:

    • Pushing the frontier was going to cost a lot of money. More than any other purported revolutionary tech.
    • Extrapolation of past improvement meant that whoever was on the cutting edge may end up with a product with a huge paying market.
    • So whoever wins this race would be rich, and the investment would have been worth it for them.

    But since 2024, we’ve seen that the cutting edge got even more expensive much faster than expected, and much of the improvements in performance now come from inference rather than training, which represents a high ongoing cost.

    Now, if we extrapolate from that trend line, we’ll see that the market will be much smaller for AI services at the cost it takes to provide that service, and the question then becomes whether the industry can make its operations cheaper, fast enough to profitably provide a service people will pay for.

    I have my doubts they’ll succeed, and we might just be looking at the industry like supersonic flight: conceptually interesting, technically feasible, but just a commercial dead end because it’s too expensive.


  • ActivityPub is the fediverse protocol, lemmy and piefed are software implementations of that protocol.

    In a similar way, email is a protocol, and Gmail and Exchange/Outlook are software implementations of that protocol. You can use Gmail to send email to Outlook users. Different people can administer their own Exchange servers on their own domains.

    And some features of the software work best with other people who use the same version of the same software, although most things kinda work between different software. Like how calendar invites sometimes act weird between users of different software, but for the most part the core functions work OK.

    So lemmy and piefed (and mbin and sublinks and some others) are different software trying to speak to other fediverse services through the ActivityPub protocol. It mostly works, but some of the details don’t work exactly the same between each type of software.