Even by “AI” standards, LLMs are extra dead: fixed weights, tiny “feedback” solely through appending next tokens, etc. Somewhere between bang-bang thermostat and a PID controller, maybe?
They took all of the scifi that related to far more potentially-alive constructions and they’re applying them to a static chatbot which is as dead as a database.
I’m kind of dubious that a large volume of DDR3 would be intrinsically cheaper per GB than a large volume of DDR5 . It was more expensive per GB when it was new, uses more silicon area per GB, and so on. It is cheaper now thanks to obsolescence, but it wouldn’t be cheaper if everyone was using it.
In a normal market (i.e. pre AI shortage), due to growth in memory capacities over time, the total consumer installed gigabytes of DDR5 would very quickly exceed the total gigabytes of DDR3 and earlier technologies, because DDR5 has greater capacity per chip.
I’m not terribly familiar with that story but from reading a synopsis it strikes me as ret-conning LLMs onto something that was written without the writer ever having in his mind anything even remotely resembling a “large language model”.
And the same cultural tropes that influenced the writer also influenced how LLM vendors are trying to sell the need for more tokens, especially because datacenters build out exceeds by far the actual demand for generated text of all kinds (as evident in e.g. your typical workplace where there’s suddenly a lot more than 2x of every kind of text). The reason for LLM “swarms” is that they need to sell companies generation of vastly more text than humans wrote within a company before AI.
There’s a Stanislaw Lem’s short story where Trurl and Klapaucius defeat a space pirate. You can read it here: https://github.com/ilonajulczuk/laughing-archer/blob/master/library/Science Fiction/The Cyberiad-Stanislaw Lem.txt (search for “the sixth sally”) and there’s a brief summary: https://everything2.com/title/Demon+of+the+Second+Kind
Lem describes an LLM down to the use of randomness, although his LLM is essentially “perfect” and only outputs factual statements, such as “how Kipling would have written the beginning to his Second Jungle Book if he had had indigestion just then”.
I think Lem’s story would help to recalibrate with regards to what “LLM described in fiction ahead of time” actually looks like.
Also, LLMs do not pursue any sort of long term goals; things like HuggingFace hack only superficially resemble it because they’re presented as such. Of course, tampering with something like HuggingFace would be discovered; if they didn’t have good monitoring then all of their containers run with GPU access would be mining crypto already. They’re pretty much a honeypot - almost no protections but robust monitoring. An LLM can easily explain to you why hacking HuggingFace would be counterproductive; but the same LLM with its context full of hacking related tokens from the ExploitGym benchmark, will treat anything that comes up as another ExploitGym type target.