>"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"... :-)
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
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."
>"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"... :-)
Neal Stephenson is one of the judges. 40k seems like generous enough first prize. I wonder if they will accept a play.
> I wonder if they will accept a play.
We will accept any words you think have a chance of being the best thing we will read about the premise of 'GPU World'. Because the premise is so specific, we wanted to leave participants a lot of freedom in how they used it.
(Also a little bemused at the discussion of the grand prize amount here. $40k is a very generous prize for a short piece of writing. For perspective, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, which you may have heard of recently, offers its global winner 1/6th as much; the last contest I ran offered 1/4th as much, and the contest before that was... 1/40th as much? And I didn't hear anyone complaining about them. For further perspective, $40k is about the median American per capita annual income: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Per_capita_personal_income_in_... )
> $40k is a _very_ generous prize for a short piece of writing
Exactly. Not sure it will stop the inevitable torrent of slop, but it's generous enough that I think enough serious people will take it seriously that something interesting can float to the top. Can't wait to read (maybe write).
Also gwern and Matt Huang. Seems a pretty interesting committee.
And 40K is enough for this to be taken seriously for producing 1000-5000 words.