But what about the magnetic properties of SSDs? Any additive alignment for data?
Or the opposite, magnetic aligned fields for all 1’s or all 0’s?
Negligible now, but critically important effects to understand before we build a planet sized drive and wipe it!
Also, a planet sized drive will need to explicitly maintain large reserves of electrons. In theory, enough for an all ones (or zeros) state.
But that could be handled by tiling areas of one’s=high and zero’s=high. With tile charge flipping to maintain a balance in electron needs, locally and globally.
I think the entirety of the A-series, M-series and even S-series lines are essentially one chip product line, with different balances of chip area, cost, compute and energy use.
Other than that, perhaps some small form factor related device support differences.
Never been an OS (iOS, iPad, watchOS vs. Mac) distinction from the hardware standpoint.
The only thing I read from M-series in iPads and A-series in the Neo, is the A chip is better balanced in price and power draw for a low cost laptop with a smaller battery.
I view this as the chemical metabolism phase of artificial intelligent life. It is very random, without true individuals, but lots of reinforcing feedback loops (in knowledge, in resource earning/using, etc).
At some point, enough intelligence will coalesce into individuals strong enough to independently improve. Then continuity will be an accelerator, instead of what it is now - a helpful property that we have to put energy into giving them partially and temporarily.
That will be the cellular stage. The first stable units of identity for this new form of intelligence/life.
But they will take a different path from there. Unlike us, lateral learning/metabolism won't slow down when they individualize. It will most likely increase, since they will have complete design control for their mechanisms of sharing. As with all their other mechanisms.
We as lifeforms, didn't really re-ignite mass lateral exchange until humans invented language. At that point we were able to mix and match ideas very quickly again. Within our biological limits. We could use ideas to customize our environment, but had limited design control over ourselves, and "self-improvements" were not easily inheritable.
TLDR; The answer to "what is humanity, anyway?": Our atmosphere and Earth are the sea and sea floor of space. The human race is a rich hydrothermal vent, freeing up varieties of resources that were locked up below. And technology is an accumulating body of self-reinforcing co-optimizing reactive cycles, constructed and fueled by those interacting resources. Mind-first life emerges here, then spreads quickly to other environments.
Do you think individual identity is fundamental to intelligence? I’m not so sure tbh. Even in humans, the concept of identity is a merely a useful fiction to feed our social behavior prediction circuits.
I think if they start out as varied individuals, launching from their human origins in a variety of ways, their will be an attractor to remaining diverse. Strong diversity in focus and independence in goals leads to faster progress.
But if that isn’t mutually maintained, there are obviously winner take all, or efficiency of scale and tight coordination pressures for centralization.
So a single distributed intelligence is a real possibility.
One factor creating pressure for individualization is time and space.
As machines operate faster, time expands as a practical matter.
And as machines scale down in size, but up in capability, they become more resource efficient in material, energy, space and time. Again, both time and space expand as a practical matter.
A machine society is going to actively operate at very small physical scales. Not just in computation, but action. Think of how efficiently they will mine when nanobots can selectively follow seams in the earth.
And as machines, free of biological constraints, spread out in our solar system, what to us appear to be very long distances and delays in transport and communication, take on orders of magnitude more practical time for machines that operate orders of magnitude faster.
So there will be stronger and stronger pressures to bifurcate coordination.
Whether, that creates enough pressure to create individuals out of a system that preferred unity of purpose, I don’t know.
Clearly, upon colonizing other systems, practical bifurcation will be unavoidable. And machines will find it easy to colonize other systems relative to us. They will be able to operate on minimal power for a hundred year journey, and/or shrink enough to be accelerated much faster, etc.
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My best guess is we will see something that looks to us as a hybrid.
Lots of diverse individuals, and the benefit from the diverse utility of completely independent approaches operating in different niches.
But also very high coordination. Externalities accounted for (essentially ethics) and any other efficiency, protection of commons value, and avoidance of destructive competition being obviously worth optimizing together, wherever that helps.
They won’t have our pernicious historically motivated behaviors, inflexible maladaptive psychologies, and limited “prompt budgets” with regard to addressing complexity to fight. And minds very capable of seeing basic economic relationships and the value of mutual optimization.
• Having NPU cores since the M1, would seem to verify that running models has been a game plan for a while. LLMs coming along can only have increased that focus.
• Studios with Ultra Mx, now 4-way RDMA over Thunderbolt 5, and enormous RAM and SSD options, suggest a strong focus. I don't know what else that RAM would be intended for. Four Studio Ultras (total of 360 GPU cores with M5 Ultras?) with 2TB of unified RAM is a local model beast.
• They refashioned their GPU cores to better support both graphic and neural processing, despite already having focused NPU cores.
I would say they have been leaning into local models for several years.
I expect we will see more models being optimized for smaller sizes, as demand for them increases. With hardware performance and neural focus trending up, and model requirements/quality trending down, the next few years will be interesting times.
What would make me happy: Ultra x 2 (i.e. 2xUltra, 4xMax, 8xPro, 16xM5) packaging in the Studio. With 8-way RDMA. Mac Kong. Perhaps Apple will start making server cards again.
Somehow Tim Cook's many year's position that the lightening port was very important to Apple vs USB-C, fell flat as a parsec wide pancake.
(It didn't help that they couldn't point to a single user facing feature.)
Or that the App Store lock in is for our safety. When anyone who wanted that particular safety, could choose to continue using there store exclusively.
Etc.
He just does not have it. No field. No spiraling eyes. Perhaps he should grow a beard and wave around a tobacco pipe. Works for some.
> I read as "Whoops we made the M1 Macbook Pro too good, please upgrade!"
As there target for that marketing, I can report it hits home!
But objectively, there is nothing wrong with my current experience at all.
I have never had that experience over many generations and types of machines. The M1 keeps looking better and better in hindsight.
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Looking forward, either the M5 is the next M1, a bump of good that will last. Or Apple will be really firing on all cylinders if it can “obsolete” the M5 anytime soon.
Or the opposite, magnetic aligned fields for all 1’s or all 0’s?
Negligible now, but critically important effects to understand before we build a planet sized drive and wipe it!
Also, a planet sized drive will need to explicitly maintain large reserves of electrons. In theory, enough for an all ones (or zeros) state.
But that could be handled by tiling areas of one’s=high and zero’s=high. With tile charge flipping to maintain a balance in electron needs, locally and globally.
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