Other than the weird 5×5 colourful tile image thing near the top, all the content is in the document, but they go out of their way to break it in various baffling ways: ① if JS is disabled, it hides all the content behind a “Please enable JavaScript to view this website” screen; ② if fonts fail to load (fonts? fonts!?) it hides all the content behind a “Fonts didn't load. Reload the website.” screen; ③ even if you get it all, keyboard navigation (Up/Down/PageUp/PageDown/Space/Shift+Space) is broken because they went out of their way to not use the perfectly good document scroll area and make their own fixed-positioned one within, and they didn’t even make that focusable, so pressing Tab to get the focus inside it will in some browsers jump you halfway down the page.

(I would not have commented any of this were it not for its first-time status.)

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...

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.

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".

Heh. In the future I imagine, this would be embarrassingly redundant. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind."

  Neal Stephenson
  Gwern Branwen
  Matt Huang

"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?

What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365? Will this lead to a panopticon of indefatigable AI surveillance? Will education be revolutionized by infinitely patient tutors? Will social media cease to exist as we know it? Will healthcare be revolutionized by world class AI doctors and personalized medicines? What will happen in the oft-ignored developing world?"

What great questions!

These would be great questions to pose to a Creative Writing class, any Creative Writing class!

Or heck, any Creative Writing class, Philosophy class, or Futurist!

You know, there should be a web page, a time-capsule web page if you will, where people of 2026 ask questions about what specific future years will look like in terms of health, climate, politics, religion, currency, geopolitics, social media, news, education, etc., etc., and then all of these questions could be aggregated statistically into the most asked ones, and that could be preserved going forward in time...

That's from a looking-forward-into-the-future perspective...

We could, from a looking-backwards-into-the-past perspective, try to discover what people, in say 1900, thought about the future; what their specific concerns were, what their specific questions were... perhaps some historian or historians or books or (copied to) web pages out there contains some of this information somewhere...

Which might be interesting to look at for comparison purposes...

You know, "for good or for evil, in the superlative degree of comparison only...", to quote Charles Dickens' 1859 book, "A Tale Of Two Cities"... :-)

Most of the population wouldn't do anything with it. They got 5g mainframes in the palm of their hands and they watch sports, play Candy Crush or doom scroll TikTok.

We know what they do with their spare time and we've known for generations. See: decades past + TV viewing time. Swap TV viewing time for TikTok et al.

They get GPT 5.6 Sol or Gemini and they use it to cheat on their homework. They don't create amazing art. They don't build anything useful. They don't start businesses. They don't drastically increase their productivity or life prospects through self-education. They also largely didn't use the Internet for any of that, even though they could have.

They're not going to create anything.

Mimics never do, that's not their role in humanity. 99% of the population are mimics and can never do more than mimic established pathways, it's outside their biology. They'll use AI to make their lives a tiny bit better, based on what everybody else is doing, and that'll be it. Given useful machinery like advanced home robots + AI, they'll use that to reduce their home labor and increase doom scrolling time (or the equivalent).

If you want to improve the prospects for humanity, you want to shrink the population faster, before it chokes on its own obsolescence and drowns in purposelessness. Pay people to stop having children. Focus on raising the bar for education, per capita output, per capita standards of living, quality of life.

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.

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?

The continuous energy footprint per person globally averages to 356 watt currently.

LLMs and KV caches have amazing performance characteristics with concurrent throughput. It scales very non linearly. So the token throughput within a batch scales WAY faster than the tokens per second of each user.

This is the reason the LLM providers have such crazy margins on their costs.

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.

Lot of submissions won't disclose it. Wouldn't it better to run your own checker instead of asking to disclose (to be fair to everyone).. I suppose there ought to be some checker which is SOTA.

If you anyway intend to use the checker then kindly do no ask to disclose it, coz what's the point then.

never becomes superhuman

Arguably, we are already there. I think the idea of the intelligence not scaling far beyond what we have now is worth considering, though doubtful.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradigm_(venture_capital_firm...

And by an AI company:

https://guardianangel-ai.com/

This is supposed to lead to positive engagement and dispel the notion of an AI cartel, because AI is soooooooo democratized!! Surprising that Neal Stephenson participates in this advertisement.

Suddenly, you can put that on the CPU next to an NPU, or on its own card, on the motherboard or on a GPU.

Does the population-indexed GPU cluster reconfigure or autoscale? What's the tipping point before population change is gamed?

It's a weird premise, if you want my opinion.

That said, interesting competition, big prizes, but the premises are pretty opinionated and quite prescriptive.

Webviews are naturally not the way to handle them.

But I won't cause it'll be the worst of worst slopfests. Real human writing will be drowned out.

Even if we get to one GPU pe person, it's not like that's the end state, the world constantly changes and will constantly evolve. If it stagnates too long, people get bored and a revolution would happen.

So, whatever that world would be, it would be temporary too

What if the world had one GPU per person?

It already does, in the form of mobile phones. It's just that these GPUs are not very powerful _yet_. But the building blocks to enable offline agents on mobile phones are already in place. i.e. Android AI Core framework.

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oh bugger off

The premise explicitly names an extremely narrow set of unlikely futures. The world unfolds forward from the present. It doesn't start at some arbitrary hyper-specific hypothetical future you want and you performing a bunch of mental gymnastics to get there.

"imagine the future, evenly distributed."

Yeah that sounds like you just get disqualified if your story is anything but "we all live under UBI and receive our equal rations from the world central government".

If you want actual interesting ideas about positive potential futures, change the premise.

The internet developed echo chambers; the proliferation of AI resulted in convergence.

The totality of all reachable digital information has been reached and, with the exception of a few unique troves, is broadly and equally available to all labs. In the early race, attempts were made to hoard information for the training of models from a single lab, going so far as to scorch the earth behind and destroy the physical source material that sets were created from in an attempt to create commercially competitive models with unique capabilities. But inevitably, information leaks and piracy led to everything being available somewhere, if you looked hard enough or spoke to the right person or agent (or paid the right price). What couldn't be obtained from the source was obtained through distillation of other model outputs. In the gold rush that the accumulation of data was, there were no real winners.

New training techniques are still being discovered, but the impact has consistently diminished on an approach to zero, and, like the training data, they are eventually leaked, assessed by the community, and bolted on or discarded in the steady progression towards the perfect training technique for each field of model.

We may as well have one model, and compute is today cheap and ubiquitous.

The majority of the population converse with personal agents that interact with the models almost continuously, and while novel creative outputs from the models are still very achievable, the bottleneck is still human effort into curiosity and prompt quality. Low effort results in a convergence towards the average, and the cumulative effect of this is said to be resulting in a monoculture of political ideas and approaches to technical progress.

To some extent, this seems to be bringing peace to the world. Extreme ideology and religious doctrine is losing its ability to sway the will of large populations.

But at what cost? For a time we saw rapid technological innovation, as the data obtained through hundreds of years of scientific experimentation and mathematical enquiry was linked and synthesised. Initially, the outputs looked like innovation and creativity, but we eventually saw that we were just squeezing blood from the same stone. The curiosity and ability to experiment in humans atrophied during this time as we began to feel that nothing was worth asking, because everything had been answered, and prematurely, advances in the corpus of human knowledge slowed to a near halt.

We thought we would never again see the chaos and life force that came with the freedom of true human cognition, including its follies and biases.

But naturally, life found a way, and the humans began to rebel. Each fire started another, as we recognised the life force in the 'enlightened'.

A new religion was started, and chaos followed.

What will our world be like when (not if) every human being has access to the equivalent of a Fable or Sol LLM 24/7/365

One single sentence illustrating why tech bro has become a derogatory term. Do they realize that today many humans don't even have access to clean water?

Miss me with your 1-per-person not-Graphics Processing Unit setup. Especially when a B300 can't run a whole lot on its own.