This reminds me of how in the era of exponential CPU speed ups (1995-2015?), people thought it wasn’t worth optimizing your programs, because the next generation of CPUs would close the gap for you. Maybe people now think that we don’t need innovations anymore, because the next generation of LLMs will either do it for us anyway, or they will make progressively better use of the existing technologies.
The era of exponential CPU speed ups went from the 1950s to 2005, when CPU speeds generally capped out at 3GHz. Since then we’ve gotten more cores, but raw speed hasn’t changed that much.
Fair enough, I actually had the sentiment in mind when I was writing down the time range. I heard that argument quite often in relation to the rise of bytecode and interpreted languages as alternatives to C/C++ for application development in the 90s. Though perhaps people had been saying this before that too.
This reminds me of how in the era of exponential CPU speed ups (1995-2015?), people thought it wasn’t worth optimizing your programs, because the next generation of CPUs would close the gap for you. Maybe people now think that we don’t need innovations anymore, because the next generation of LLMs will either do it for us anyway, or they will make progressively better use of the existing technologies.
score 1 · canonical
The era of exponential CPU speed ups went from the 1950s to 2005, when CPU speeds generally capped out at 3GHz. Since then we’ve gotten more cores, but raw speed hasn’t changed that much.
score 1 · canonical
Fair enough, I actually had the sentiment in mind when I was writing down the time range. I heard that argument quite often in relation to the rise of bytecode and interpreted languages as alternatives to C/C++ for application development in the 90s. Though perhaps people had been saying this before that too.
score 1 · canonical