Data centers?

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Originally Posted by Rogar

I hope Bae is right. I've heard theories that AI may find solutions to the problems it creates.

I've wondered how much of the demand for AI is industrial and related to increased productivity or science and medical research and advancements, and how much is personal frivolous Tik-Toks, putting animal heads on friends bodies, computer generated videos, getting prime orders the same day, and the general widespread use of smart phones.

I can recall feeding punch cards into computers and learning COBAL. It seems like there was a time when we went to the moon using slide rulers. It's almost like a new era.

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I think we will also see a lot of AI advances in military applications. Projects with names like “Hellscape”, “Loyal Wingman” and “Overmatch” are already underway. The DoD and Anthropic are already battling over the use of an AI called “Claude”, with the feds threatening to invoke the Defense Production Act. The prospect of inhumanly fast, utterly fearless autonomous weapons systems must attract the attention of militaries the world over.

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Originally Posted by LDAHL

I think we will also see a lot of AI advances in military applications. ... The prospect of inhumanly fast, utterly fearless autonomous weapons systems must attract the attention of militaries the world over.

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It would be instructional to see how rapidly modern warfare has evolved the past few years during the Ukraine-Russia war. Drones, drones, drones. Land, sea, air. And some amazing advances in logistics/production of drones...

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Originally Posted by bae

It would be instructional to see how rapidly modern warfare has evolved the past few years during the Ukraine-Russia war. Drones, drones, drones. Land, sea, air. And some amazing advances in logistics/production of drones...

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And that was between a third rate power largely improvising against a second rate power. Look how Ukraine was able to seriously degrade the Russian strategic air capability on a logistical shoestring. A contested invasion of Taiwan or a greater Indo-Pacific war between the US and China could well show us the biggest change since the great powers thought they could win the First World War with cavalry.

I got that the points Anthopic objected to was its use for domestic surveillance or totally autonomous weapons. The government seems to need something to keep from shooting down border patrol drones with lasers.

Trump and Hegseth's actions today, if they stand, pretty much guarantee the USA will not be a significant player in future AI R&D. It's handing over the future to China and Europe.

Catherine: That's interesting about your job at NBC. I suspect most of us here are in the right age group to have watched various tasks/systems shift from manual to computerized. I can think of some tasks I have done in the past that seem like an incredibly silly waste of effort and paper compared to how they would be handled today.

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Originally Posted by rosarugosa

Catherine: That's interesting about your job at NBC. I suspect most of us here are in the right age group to have watched various tasks/systems shift from manual to computerized. I can think of some tasks I have done in the past that seem like an incredibly silly waste of effort and paper compared to how they would be handled today.

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l yes to that. I spent many hours standing in front of library card catalogs, filing cards for title, subject, author entries. a slower pace of life, and a meditative activity for sure.

But with the advent of machines taking away the mundane, we should be able to find other satisfyingly meditative activities. For me weeding is one of those, I’m often
in “the zone “ when weeding.

I took some time today to install and test the open-source "Gwen 3.5" AI model, from China, released just a few days ago by Alibaba (strange world, but...).

I installed it on a late-2023 Apple Macbook Pro, maximally configured with 64GB of memory and the M3 Max processor.

Performance and quality of output were superb. Amazingly so. The research papers indicated this new model had made some fundamental, and huge, advances in efficiency and algorithmic power. They did not lie.

I did my experiments running the model totally locally on a 2.5 year old laptop from 2 generations ago. Note that Apple released the Macbook Pro with the new M5 Max processor just today, and it has vastly improved specs, especially on AI task. 6-7x faster.

This new model is giving me results comparable, or better than, the cloud-based ChatGPT and Claude leading-edge research models of 9 months ago running on giant cloud server farms. The speed is a bit slower locally, but for my uses, the speed difference is not significant.

So, those big server farms are just silly, when Alibaba can make them obsolete in a day.

I am a hopeless luddite for understanding some of the AI functions, but are you saying a powerful home computer reduces the need for the big data servers.

I've been using ChatGTP to help restore some old family photos and clean up old yellowing news paper clippings. Initially I was using the free Chat, but have subscribed for a month or two for $20/ month. The paid version is much faster. I suppose that's a pretty simplistic use for such a powerful tool, but it goes quickly. I have an older version of Photoshop back before they required a subscription and it would take a very long time to do the same in Photoshop, however i seem to get some minor distortions with Chat.