Future Of Compute
As AI systems advance compute will be really valuable in the future. I believe everyone needs to have a certain amount of compute as a basic right. We as a society will have to have that conversation at some point. I have a feeling we will have some sort of distributed compute thing. Maybe backed by blockchain. A compute coin.
But just like a currency is backed by gold/dollar it has to be backed by something. That something is actual hardware. An actual computer doing the compute. People can pool together their compute coins for compute-heavy tasks. Some big inference or even training.
We will have to devise some way to measure compute owned by each person. Some standard. And when I and my friend put 5 and 5 compute coins each it won't make 10 compute coins. Because the underlying hardware needs to coordinate(network latency). Also, there are limits on gains from parallel processing as we increase the parallel processors. So if the 100th person puts 10 compute coins it might only increase combined coins by 0.1.
I don't want to be dependent on some big org having massive fusion energy-driven compute farms handing out compute to us masses. Maybe they will launch their own compute coins backed by all the compute they have. So for them, 5+5 coins might be more like 9 or 9.9 even. I don't like that. Because then they have a say on who gets the coins and who doesn't. Sounds just like governments these days with money. Yeah, I have a problem with that as well.
We need to move to a future where we as people have more power to decide. But as I said distributed computing has problems. We can't all come together like power rangers and go head to head with these massive compute farms. There are bandwidth limits. Even if we figure out the optimal software to distribute workloads.
I don't know how we will navigate all this but the technical aspects of these challenges excite me a lot.