One issue with germanium, and even more so with gallium, is the very limited number of sources for them. China controls over 70% of world germanium production, and well over 90% of gallium. Get dependent on one or the other for computing and you are thus dependent on China for computing.

I've worked in construction, restaurants, farms, retail and factories, all places heavily populated by the people falling in the lower half of the IQ scale. The majority of dumb people have no more imagination than a sheep, which is why they're also the core Trump voters.

If you're referring to the Carlin quote, he recognized the difference but had to deliver the line to an audience made up of a goodly portion of people who were already drunk and/or stoned.

If you're referring to what I wrote, the IQ test (which I recognize is not actually accurate because of cultural bias, but it's a phrase that everyone understands) then an IQ of 100 is designed to be the midpoint, with half the population above and half under. Unless it's changed in the last quarter century, it was intended to measure the mean.

Oh, carp. Posting to fix bad mod.

And what about the half of the population which has an IQ lower than 100? Dumb people need to eat too, and if they can't they pick up pitchforks and torches (metaphorically). When robots run by AIs are washing dishes and picking strawberries the people who previously did those jobs are not going to be doing things requiring "human creativity and judgement".

Indeed, so the more the insurance cartel can charge the more profit they can suck in. That's not a hard equation. Perhaps if there were actually some minimal amount of competition allowed in the business prices might be lower, but that's just crazy talk . . .

Yep. There are ultrasound wands that can plug into your phone, and AIs that can analyze the scan, for under $3000.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fspectrum.ieee.org%2Fmems...

Yeah, it's not even worth considering for something like 15-20kg. A full pallet in this case is 464kg :) Years worth of supply for me.

Don't mistake ChatGTP as representative of all types of AI, because it's not. And you shouldn't mistake "highly-trained jobs" as being only ones requiring extensive education, it takes years of training to run the largest heavy equipment but China already has fully automated open pit mining. AI is automating drafting of building plans, logistical planning, and purchasing, all fields where 'hallucinations' would be catastrophic and yet it doesn't occur. The lack of education about this exceedingly important field, even among those who one would expect to be more technologically knowledgeable like SlashDot users, is appalling.

The current "AI" is a predictive engine.

And *you* are a predictive engine as well; prediction is where the error metric for learning comes from. (I removed the word "search" from both because neither work by "search". Neither you nor LLMs are databases)

It looks at something and analyzes what it thinks the result should be.

And that's not AI why?

AI is, and has always been, the field of tasks that are traditionally hard for computers but easy for humans. There is no question that these are a massive leap forward in AI, as it has always been defined.

It is absolutely crazy that we are all very very soon going to lose access to electricity

Calm down. Total AI power consumption (all forms of AL, both training and inference) for 2025 will be in the ballpark of 50-60TWh. Video gaming consumes about 350TWh/year, and growing. The world consumes ~25000 TWh/yr in electricity. And electricity is only 1/5th of global energy consumption.

AI datacentres are certainly a big deal to the local grid where they're located - in the same way that any major industry is a big deal where it's located. But "big at a local scale" is not the same thing as "big at a global scale." Just across the fjord from me there's an aluminum smelter that uses half a gigawatt of power. Such is industry.

That "ruler study" was ancient. It's mentioned in peer review at least as early as 2018, and might be even older.

Believe it or not, people in the field are familiar with these sorts of things that you just read about.

Most of these new AI tools have gained their new levels of performance by incorporating Transformers in some form or another, in part or in whole. Transformers is the backend of LLMs.

Even in cases where Transformers isn't used these days, often it's imitated. For example, the top leaderboards in vision models are a mix of ViTs (Vision Transformers) and hybrids (CNN + transformers), but there are still some "pure CNNs" that are high up. But the best performing "pure CNNs" these days use techniques modeled after what Transformers is doing, e.g. filtering data with an equivalent of attention and the like.

The simple fact is that what enabled LLMs is enabling most of this other stuff too.

Jevons Intensifies

Thanks for pointing that out, far too many people think that ChatGPT is representative of all AI. There are a LOT of exceedingly important uses AIs of various types have been put to, this being one one of them. Robotics for example relies on it completely, the days of writing thousands of lines of code just to get your robotic quadruped to walk in a straight line on a level floor are gone (thank goodness). Atlas can do a backflip and Picklebot can unload a truck of random boxes because they are controlled by a properly trained AI.