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Comment by bugake | Hacker News Reader

Modern CPUs have hundreds of megabytes of cache. That's more than the entire hard disk space required by Windows in the 1990s.

You could install an entire Windows system, emulated in cache of a modern CPU, including the hard disk, and modern computers are still slow, partly because the CPU does nothing while waiting for RAM to fetch data, and partly because decades of people prioritizing abstractions over efficient coding have made software totally inefficient.

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Software has gotten vastly more complex over the intervening decades, and unfortunately it has historically been beyond human capacity and/or institutional time/money availability to keep everything running super efficiently.

The good news is that with LLMs, we can make software efficient again, much more cheaply!

I go to Hacker News to hear people say that LLMs will automagically make software clean and efficient again.

Then I go back to Cursor’s agent chat window and spend another day endlessly struggling to keep LLMs from inserting needless complexity and N+1 queries into the code at a faster rate than mere humans could ever hope to achieve.

LLMs helping with efficiency comes long after AGI.

Dude, LLMs are finding algorithmic efficiency solutions where humans have long assumed there were none. We're inside the singularity now.

Which definition of singularity are you using? I'm still doing my own laundry and taking out the trash, though I could hire a human to do that job if I had the money for it.

We're not at the singularity, but we've passed the point of no return.

I’ve been studying and working in AI for almost 3 decades now, and made at least an amateur’s study of the field’s 70-ish year history. Much has changed, including the word we use for this concept, but one immutable constant is that we have always been teetering on the brink of the singularity.

Now isn’t even the first time people got so excited about an automatic proof finder that they declared that it’s already here.

Strangely enough, one of the shortest math papers ever published is another computer disproof of a long-standing conjecture, by Lander and Parkin (1966):

"A direct search on the CDC 6600 yielded 27⁵ + 84⁵ + 110⁵ + 133⁵ = 144⁵ as the smallest instance in which four fifth powers sum to a fifth power. This is a counterexample to a conjecture by Euler that at least n nth powers are required to sum to an nth power, n > 2."

https://projecteuclid.org/journals/bulletin-of-the-american-...

So yeah, computers have been slaughtering math tentpoles since forever ago, but I don't think I've seen so many big ones taken down so quickly. Although if Euler had been alive when the 1966 paper was published, he might've crashed out the way Terence Tao is doing now.

In the end LLMs were also trained on all the incorrect and suboptimal solutions and examples.

Complexity has nothing to do with memory access patterns.

> Modern CPUs have hundreds of megabytes of cache.

Not for the cache that can load in a register in 1 cycle. L1i/d cache is still at 32k-64k per core.

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