Post #1579592

2026-04-23 14:08 UTC

There’s no reason to think this case will be different. Not even the end of Moore’s Law? I’m not sure if you’re aware, but processors aren’t really getting much more efficient anymore. They’re just getting bigger (more parallel), which is why the price for the newer generations of GPUs has been skyrocketing. A new top-end GPU twice as much (or more) as a previous-gen one because it has twice as many (or more) compute units, since they can’t make the individual compute units much faster due to fundamental laws of physics.

Replies (3)

@iByteABit@lemmy.ml 2026-04-23 14:16

There’s always two sides to software, one is the power of the hardware, and the other is the efficiency of the software. I think in this case OP means that AI will be optimized so much that it will require tiny fractions of the resources it previously needed, at least for the casual use cases of an average person asking a simple question or performing a small task.

Open ##1579591
@yogthos@lemmy.ml 2026-04-23 14:22

I expect that software will continue to get optimized, and we’ll see new algorithms that are more efficient than what people are doing currently. However, it’s possible we’ll start seeing hardware specifically built for models as well. For example, there’s already a startup that uses ASIC chips to print the model directly to the chip. Since each transistor acts as a state, it doesn’t need DRAM and the whole chip requires a small amount of SRAM which isn’t in short supply right now www.anuragk.com/blog/posts/Taalas.html The limitation with this approach is that the chip is made for a specific model, but that’s not really that different from the way regular chips work either. You buy a chip and if it does what you need, it keeps working. When new models come out, new chips get printed, and if you need the new capabilities then you upgrade.

Open ##1579770
@eldavi@lemmy.ml 2026-04-23 14:52

i suspect that we’ve neared the end of what we can get out of using silicon and the only way forward, at this point, is to switch materials altogether into something like graphene or carbon; but i bet it would take a long time to ever do that because the profit motives that keeps on silicon won’t allow for it.

Open ##1582791