As Rocks May Think

https://evjang.com/2026/02/04/rocks.html

by modeless • 6 months ago

87 82 6 months ago

Yes, yes, we are all going to be living in an automated & luxurious communist utopia. Here are some material facts to ground the exuberance: 1) Lifecycel of typical GPU in a data center is 1-3 years, 2) Buildout is already limited by production capacity & will hit production walls by 2027-2028 when turnover matches & exceeds production capacity, 3) TSMCs projected capacity is ~130k wafers/month & it is not keeping up w/ demand which is more than doubling, 4) Power consumption for these "geniuses" & "thinking rocks" in data centers requires lots of power & the capacity was saturated in 2025, 5) So along w/ production capacity limitations power production is now another gating factor.

Anyway, like data centers in space there are lots of material limitations that all of these exuberant "ZOMG rocks can think now" essays all sweep under the rug to drive a very biased narrative about what is actually happening & the fact that all those binary bits are produced by real materials that have lifecycles & production limits not visible in the digital artifacts.

zozbot2345• 6 months ago

GPU lifecycle is 1-3 years because GPUs are becoming obsolete for cutting-edge work (especially re: power use) in that timeframe. This is good news if you'd like to see expanded use of AI. Production walls at fabs will matter little since future silicon dies will be capable of far more per unit area than current ones, so there will be plenty of incentive to upgrade.

measurablefunc5• 6 months ago

I'm just stating facts. I don't care whether it's a good or bad thing. You can theorycraft about future utopias w/ computronium as much as you want but the facts as they stand today are what I stated.

lawrenceyan• 6 months ago

Biggest update I see is that he thinks AI 2027 is actually going to happen.

emp173442• 6 months ago

We’re going to see all talk of AI 2027 quietly disappear as folks realize how out-of-touch with reality it is. I have no idea why people take that crap seriously.

munificent8• 6 months ago

We are entering a golden age in which all computer science problems seem to be tractable, insomuch as we can get very useful approximations of any computable function.

Alternatively, we are entering a dark age where the billionaires who control most of the world's capital will no longer need to suffer the indignity of paying wages to humans in order to generate more revenue from information products and all of the data they've hoarded over the past couple of decades.

the real kicker is that we now have general-purpose thinking machines that can use computers and tackle just about any short digital problem.

We already have those thinking machines. They're called people. Why haven't people solved many of the world's problems already? Largely because the people who can afford to pay them to do so have chosen not to.

I don't see any evidence that the selfishness, avarice, and short-term thinking of the elites will be improved by them being able to replace their employees with a bot army.

measurablefunc5• 6 months ago

What you fail to understand Bob is that as long as we let the billionaires do what they want then we all automatically win. That's just how the system is designed to work, we can't lose as long as Musk & his buddies are at the helm.

munificent8• 6 months ago

Gazing up at them adoringly, mouth open, waiting for it all to trickle down on my face.

Centigonal• 6 months ago

I don't understand why you're being downvoted. This is a topic worth discussing.

Like every previous invention that improves productivity (cf. copiers, steam power, the wheel), this wave of AI is making certain forms of labor redundant, creating or further enriching a class of industrialists, and enabling individuals to become even more productive.

This could create a golden age, or a dark age -- most likely, it will create both. The industrial revolution created Dickensian London, the Luddite rebellion & ensuing massacres, and Blake's "dark satanic mills," but it also gave me my wardrobe of cool $30 band T-shirts and my beloved Amtrak train service.

Now is the time to talk about how we predict incentive structures will cause this technology to be used, and what levers we have at our disposal to tilt it toward "golden age."

keybored• 6 months ago

People fought back. Who is fighting back now?

Capitalists have openly gloated in public about wanting to replace at least one profession. That was months or years ago. What are people doing in response? Discussing incentive structures?

SC coders paid hundreds of thousands a year are just letting this happen to them. “Nothing to be done about another 15K round of layoffs, onlookers say”

beeflet3• 6 months ago

Unlike every previous invention that improves productivity, It is making every form of labor redundant.

sunsunsunsun• 6 months ago

Considering the usage of LLMs by many people as a sort of friend or psychologist we also get to look forward to a new form a control over people. These things earn peoples "trust" and there is no reason why it couldn't be used to sway peoples opinions. Not to mention the devious and subtle ways it can advertise to people.

Also, these productivity gains arent used to reduce working time for the same number of people, but instead to reduce the number of people needed to do the same amount of work. Working people get to see the productivity benefits via worsening material conditions.

denkmoon2• 6 months ago

A labouring proletariat with bread and circuses is a distracted proletariat. Billionaires are still flesh and blood, much like Louis XVI and Charles I.

AndrewKemendo5• 6 months ago

Are you actually doing anything in that direction or is this “tough guy on the internet?”

I see literally zero people doing the equivalent of “breaking the factories” like the luddites attempted

skybrian2• 6 months ago

I don't think you've read those quotes very closely? He's writing about all computer science problems. And "just about any short digital problem" is not the same as solving the world's problems.

AI ghosts can do a lot of things, but they're limited by being non-physical.

munificent8• 6 months ago

He does also say:

The entire global economy is re-organizing around the scale-up of AI models.
Software engineering is just the beginning; ...
Air conditioning currently consumes 10% of global electricity production, while datacenter compute less than 1%. We will have rocks thinking all the time to further the interests of their owners. Every corporation with GPUs to spare will have ambient thinkers constantly re-planning deadlines, reducing tech debt, and trawling for more information that helps the business make its decisions in a dynamic world.
Militaries will scramble every FLOP they can find to play out wargames, like rollouts in a MCTS search. What will happen when the first decisive war is won not by guns and drones, but by compute and information advantage? Stockpile your thinking tokens, for thinking begets better thinking.

So he is extending this to more than just computer science.

keeda• 6 months ago

Here are my thoughts, which are not fully formed because AI is still so new. But taking this line of thought reductio ad absurdum, it becomes apparent that the elites have a critical dependency on us plebs:

Almost all of their wealth is ultimately derived from people.

The rich get richer by taking a massive cut of the economy, and the economy is basically people providing and paying for services and goods. If all the employees are replaced and can earn no money, there is no economy. Now the elite have two major problems:

a) What do they take a cut of to keep getting richer?

b) How long will they be safe when the resentment eventually boils over? (There's a reason the doomsday bunker industry is booming.)

My hunch is, after a period of turmoil, we'll end up in the usual equilibrium where the rest of the world is kept economically growing just enough to keep (a) us stable enough not to revolt and (b) them getting richer. I don't know what that looks like, could be UBI or something. But we'll figure it out because our incentives are aligned: we all want to stay alive and get richer (for varying definitions of "richer" of course.)

However, I suspect a lot will change quickly, because a ton of things that made up the old world order is going to be upended. Like, you'd need millions in funding to hire a team to launch any major software product; this ultimately kept the power in the hands of those with capital. Now a single person with an AI agent and a cloud platform can do it themselves for pocket change. This pattern will repeat across industries.

The power of capital is being disintermediated, and it's not clear what the repercussions will be.

esafak• 6 months ago

This looks like a survey. Is there a thesis; any claim?

tejohnso3• 6 months ago

Sounds like OP is happy to be alive at this moment, reveling in the wonder of it all, and wanting to share.

alsetmusic3• 6 months ago

This person doesn't understand how LLMs work.

DennisP3• 6 months ago

Care to be more specific?

alsetmusic3• 6 months ago

See reply in related thread.

pradeesh• 6 months ago

Not sure how you could read this essay and come to that conclusion. It definitely aligns with my own understanding, and his conclusions seem pretty reasonable (though the AI 2027/Situational Awareness part might be arguable)

alsetmusic3• 6 months ago

Absolutely:

In order to predict where thinking and reasoning capabilities are going, it's important to understand the trail of thought that went into today's thinking LLMs.

No. You don't understand at all. They don't think. They don't reason. They are statistical word generators. They are very impressive at doing things like writing code, but they don't work the way that is being inferred here.

TacticalCoder• 6 months ago

As Rocks May Think

I thought they meant the plural of ASRock as in "ASRocks May think" and thought this was about ASRock motherboards getting a BIOS/UEFI with an integrated LLM or something.

xyzsparetimexyz• 6 months ago

[flagged]

zozbot2345• 6 months ago

Nah, the ugliest prose is clanker prose and this definitely isn't. This stuff comes 100% from an actual carbon-based lifeform.

beeflet3• 6 months ago

Who is the wise guy that gave water the ability to think

akovaski• 6 months ago

I think that Gemini regularly generates inane metaphors like the above. As an example, here's a message that it sent me when I was attempting to get it to generate a somewhat natural conversation:

----

Look, if you aren't putting salt on your watermelon, you’re basically eating flavored water. It’s the only way to actually wake up the sweetness. People who think it’s "weird" are the same ones who still buy 2-in-1 shampoo.

Anyway, I saw a guy at the park today trying to teach a cat to walk on a leash. The cat looked like it was being interrogated by the FBI, just dead-weighting it across the grass while he whispered "encouragement."

Physical books are vastly superior to Kindles solely for the ability to judge a stranger's taste from across a coffee shop. You can’t get that hit of elitism from a matte gray plastic slab.

----

This was with a prompt telling it to skip Reddit-style analogies.

appellations• 6 months ago

Author is Vice President of AI, 1X Technologies.

netsharc• 6 months ago

The article goes from philosophical (what AI will do to society) to jargony blowhard and then even deeper look (I think. I flicked my thumb past several screens of text), and back out again.

Come on author, learn to write properly. Or tell your LLM to not mix a philosophical article with a technical one.

kagol• 6 months ago

Curious about the root of your distaste. Just a bad analogy/visualization?

mynameisjody• 6 months ago

I'm still waiting for one of these articles to be written by someone without something to be directly gained by the hype. Eric Jang, VP of AI at 1X.

johnfn4• 6 months ago

The previous post in this blog is titled "Leaving 1X". So your wait is over!

RealityVoid• 6 months ago

Unrelated, but it seems his previous company, 1x, was initially named Halodi and was located in Norway. And eventually, it was moved with all employees in Silicon Valley. How the hell does that work? That sounds like a logistical nightmare.Do you upend all those people's lives? Do you fire those who refuse? How many norwegians even want to go to the US? Sounds crazy to me.

Paracompact• 6 months ago

Very, very likely he is remaining in the AI space.

macrocosmos• 6 months ago

AI generated videos are indistinguishable from reality.

piekvorst4• 6 months ago

Chief among all changes is that machines can code and think quite well now.

They can’t and never will.

johnfn4• 6 months ago

Are you really claiming that there isn't a machine in existence that can code? And that that is never possible?

wavemode• 6 months ago

I think "quite", "well", and "now" are the objectionable parts of the quote.

piekvorst4• 6 months ago

It can code in an autocomplete sense. In the serious sense, if we don’t distinguish between code and thought, it can’t.

Observe that modern coding agents rely heavily on heuristics. LLM excels at training datasets, at analyzing existing knowledge, but it can’t generate new knowledge on the same scale, its thinking (a process of identification and integration) is severely limited on the conscious level (context window), where being rational is most valuable.

Because it doesn’t have volition, it cannot choose to be logical and not irrational, it cannot commit to attaining the full non-contradictory awareness of reality. That’s why I said “never.”

lrc• 6 months ago

if you click through to the linked Vannevar Bush article and scroll down there are a bunch of vintage ads around the prose that are kind of interesting. And some of the predictions have been well overtaken by events!

inimino• 6 months ago

This research process is the same as what I've been doing.

https://cmpr.ai/hutter/archive/

Claude does the research, like having an army of very fast but forgetful grad students working for free.

The individual paper doesn't make much incremental improvement but once you get a pipeline of results building in a particular direction it's powerful.

As Rocks May Think

Related Stories