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This comic hung in my office for years (slrpnk.net)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/science_memes@mander.xyz
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[–] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I would say it's good journalism to take the claim of "general purpose" intelligence by AI companies at face value and see that it doesn't hold up. Making outlandish claims allows for silly comparisons

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think this depends on how you define "general purpose".

    The CPU is a "general purpose" processor but it's not very efficient at graphics or cryptography tasks.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    I wouldn't say a normal CPU is inefficient at graphics or cryptography, rather that a specialized GPU is particularly efficient at those tasks.

    We only consider a CPU slow at these tasks because of how much faster a GPU is with them, but we never see how much worse a GPU is at general conputation tasks, because of how stupendously bad it is.

    As soon as operations need to share info, the GPU speed advantage is gone. Branching paths bog a GPU down with redundant execution. Latency is quite poor too. And exceptions & interrupts are basically impossible at the system level. Trying to run normal programs on the GPU would be a disaster.

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