The Price of Intelligence Is Falling Rapidly

silverFork

Price of human intelligence is also falling rapidly. I suspect looking pretty is going to go up in value more rapidly.

hyperionultra

Well, since llms need matterial for self-education, someone still had to be inteligent enough. Or llms will freeze their “intelect” at some point.

2OEH8eoCRo0

A race to the bottom on price will be very good for profits!

129348681

The actual report is by Epoch AI, which is financed by totally independent funds like (Eric) Schmidt Sciences. Professor Tabarrok uncritically praises the report, which might lead to the conclusion that either human intelligence or moral standards are "falling rapidly".

serious_angel

These ML/LLM/AI are systems where no one will ever be accountable for and guarantee its stability, safety, and its value. ML/LLM/AI may be useful, but it must always be considered unauthorized, mistrust, experimental, unverified, always probable to fail on each iteration. Its data must always be accountably supervized by an alive human, who realizes responsibility, life, pain, art, effort, love... Always, even at 2999+ years/times. No life/pain/art/love is no sense/trust/confidence/respect/safety. That is, it may be fun to play with as a toy, as any ML/LLM/AI based system, where no trust exist but only probability, entropy, chance, luck... but nothing serious, time-rewarding, or humane enough to appreciate and love it in the long run. An actual Developer is someone who prioritizes thinking and solution finding relying on something deterministic and accountable. All systems based on LLM, ML, or anything that is algorithmically based on feedback system, learning, training, is indeterministic, and hence, always inaccurate, unreliable, and irresponsible systems, by design. The process of art-working, coding, programming, development, solution finding... that feel of an achievement. This is what I understand, too. There's no achievement in anything AI-driven - it based on luck/moment/probability/chance. "Oh My God! Please, all Gods, make this AI output the finally correct code! Please!" Fudge it. And you also pay for it. You pay and depend on it, on the the luck, for the chance, for the probability someone controls for you over an API or algorithm you don't even know or cannot verify due its "self-training" design, or it being close-sourced. > ...you're gatekeeping programming... you are not seeing the big picture... you are missing opportunities... No, sorry, never. I do not agree with that. These "responses" are coming from infants, immature, children, I believe, sorry... from those who could not care less about the development, responsibility, the overall process of the life of us, people, to find solutions, to reach the goals, to treasure achievements, to write our history with actual names of people on papers sign on papers by hand... for what will leave after us, with art, statues, quotes... in the infinite history of the ineffably magnificent world... Your name should be in the code you write alone or with a team, your commits, solutions. Your work must be acknowledged and kept in the history. You should be always a respectable alive artist, who is responsible for their work. Our history must evolve, be preserved, respected, appreciated, and shine with glory of our achievements with human names in it for the incredibly marvelous future of opportunities, discoveries, love, and purely magnificent marvel. There's whole space out there, still, and we must add and keep human names in the history cherished. > Machines should work. People should think. ~ IBM

sublinear

When intelligence is seen as a means to an end, rather than the lifeblood of your own perception, it makes sense the "price" goes down. What's being bought is, after all, artificial intelligence. The price of intelligence is the same. What's being lowered is the standard of living.

fallingfrog

This is really what the property owning class wants- they know they are not that smart and they have always paid other people to be smart for them, but the fact that the time of smart, educated people is expensive has always galled them. As another commenter said, many of us have viewed our intelligence as a key part of our personhood and how we perceive and interact with the world. But capitalism has found a way to convert that, too, into a purchaseable commodity. If intelligence is now meaningless and being perceptive is worthless, all that remains is the ugliness of stupid power.

OutOfHere

It may be true for text outputs, but it's absolutely untrue for other modalities: image, speech, voice, and embedding. Heck, embedding models haven't even been updated in years.

21asdffdsa12

Which reduces the price for hacking, which reduces the price of societal and technological rent-seeking aka parasitism, resulting in a unprecedented buildup of hatred on non-society contributing, extractive intelligence/parasitism. We are going to get lynchmobs hanging parasites and burning down data-centers before long.

bamboozled

Absolute BS, my experience is people are using this "intelligence" to do more dumb shit. I'm not seeing intelligence, I'm seeing unqualified people wielding power tools but they don't know any basic carpentry skills.

_superposition_

I love marginal revolution. But I'm not fond of the unit stated. I dont believe we're buying intelligence. I'm sure marketing will run with it though.

drstewart

The price of wisdom is unchanged, however

trallnag

This makes looksmaxxing even more important, according to my agent's opinion

LurkandComment

Cost per token goes down yes. But are you using more tokens per task/ prompt/ project?

cs702

Yes, the price of inference is falling rapidly. What about the cost? Inference looks like a viable business model for those operators that have access to SOTA model and serving infrastructure, but the investment required to have it is enormous, and appears to be never-ending, because if an operator stops investing aggressively, its model and serving infrastructure quickly become non-competitive, and customers will quickly leave for alternatives.

jmull

> This is one reason the open-model threat is not as large as it appears: frontier models don’t merely outperform older models; they are rapidly becoming cheaper to run at any given level of performance. This really misses the point. The “threat” (to the profits of big AI companies) is that competition will drive prices down in a race to the bottom. It doesn’t really “help” (drive the profits for big AI companies) if that competition comes from open-ish models or from competing big AI companies or anywhere else.

mvc

Why does electricity stop at 1973? It's been going back up again for the last few years.