GPU World: What Happens When Everyone Gets a Frontier AI?
GPU World is a story contest asking people to imagine a future where AI progress halts but compute scales: by 2040, every person on Earth could have constant access to a frontier LLM like Fable or Sol. The premise explores a 'business as usual' future—no singularity, just ubiquitous AI. Will it bring a panopticon of surveillance, infinite tutors, or AI doctors? The contest invites you to envision this mundane yet transformative world, especially for the developing world.
Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'.
- maxnevermind
> Someday, such as in 2040, there may be available, for every human being, the performance equivalent of 'a B300 GPU for contemporary LLMs'. What would this world be like?
If we talk about just LLMs, given how things have been going since ChatGPT, my bet it would not change that much. LLMs are not foundational technology such as Internet or Steam engine or Rail roads were. There are very few products that can build upon them because of reliability issues which are completely unresolvable for LLMs, chatbots is a decent product that came out of it, coding harnesses is another one, this is not even close to the impact Internet or Steam engine had. LLMs gave us nice productivity tools for highly motivated expert knowledge workers, that is all. LLMs are getting better and will get better, but it is impossible to describe the universe and compress it into few terabytes and that is what they are doing atm effectively, so all serious LLMs's issues will still be there in 2040: the lack on continues learning, hallucinations, terrible sample ratio, agent's failures on long horizon tasks, instruction following failures.
- NitpickLawyer
I just finished reading Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky [1], a really timely novel that deals with lots of open ended questions of AI, robots, humanity, control, self determination, and so on. Really recommend it if you're into these kinds of things.
> Premise
Imagine that AI frontier progress stops as of 1 September 2026: AI becomes faster and cheaper, but it never becomes superhuman or improves considerably across the board.
I absolutely love this premise. I wrote a comment a few days ago about this very thing. I've had this "revelation" in early 2024, when using a small local model, that even if models never improve, I'd still have a few years of discovering all the things I could do with the models.
Really cool, hopefully we get some interesting and not overwhelmingly pessimistic stories out of this project. There's enough cynicism and negativity in the world. We could use some funny takes on everyone using openclaw2040 ran by fable. Shenanigans galore.
[1] - https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/195790861-service-mod...
- rixed
Since the dawn of industry, people have been amazed by the new possibilities and how that would affect society once it's evenly distributed. Technical progress has been going on, percolating in every places and down to every person. Yet it's never been "evenly distributed".
What would happen when every one would have access to Internet? How different will the world be when everyone carries a computer in their pocket? Can communicate with anyone regardless of location and language, with no intermediary? Those were questions we used to ask ourselves not so long ago.
Turned out: not much have changed.
For the future to be evenly distributed, much bigger changes will have to happen than large scale manufacture of efficient GPUs. Otherwise, tech will just be used to make sure progress and knowledge stays unevently distributed. That's the whole game of herding humans, after all; It's called "organized scarcity".
- ezoe
Not all humans have equally capable literacy and industrial background.
To use current Top AI SaaS models for coding, the users have to write text prompts. There is clear difference of result by programmer and non-programmer.
Image and music generation have exactly same skill gap.
So most human don't directly use AI even if it's available to all 8 billion population.
But I really doubt we will have such all humans use AI.
The current estimate said 80% of world population own a cellphone. 50% own a smartphone. Even the cellphone is not reached 100% share, how could AI with current top model quality reach 100% share?
- not2b
Hopefully in this world, someone figures out how to deliver the performance equivalent of a B300 GPU for about 1/100th the power of a current B300 (which can be up to 1400 watts), or the world will bake.
- jdub
LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; [...] We request disclosure of AI use.
Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."
- divbzero
Quite an interesting selection committee:
Neal Stephenson
Gwern Branwen
Matt Huang
- markoutso
> LLM use is permitted, but discouraged; we remind participants that LLM use tends to reduce originality and writing quality, and the flaws are especially obvious when LLM outputs are read as a group---unskillful use of LLMs will reduce the odds of being the best entry. We request disclosure of AI use.