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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   1621 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for February 20, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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The path to ubiquitous AI (17k tokens/sec): A company (TALAAS) just announced a chip that runs LLMs very fast: according to their graph, 8.5x as fast as Cerebras, which is 5.6x as fast as Nvidia. Try it for yourself. It's running LLaMa 3.1 8B, so rather dumb, but the answers are nearly instant. Allegedly it's much cheaper (10x) than GPUs, too. A downside is that the model is hard-wired into the chip, allegedly two months from model to production.

Any use cases that aren't possible with today's (relatively) slower and more expensive models? Perhaps you put this on a router to have a very smart firewall. Or have it repeatedly generate code and fix bugs until a test suite passes, which Opus and Codex do but they can take a while. Then again, it's not instant, and frontier models already generate text very fast, much faster than a human can write or even read.

This is so cool but immediate gut reaction is that this

A downside is that the model is hard-wired into the chip

Is a deal-breaker in a world that is massively constrained by fab (right now literally anything wafer based (i.e. RAM too) not just CPU/GPU) capacity

In a world where fab capacity is plentiful and machine time cheap (i.e. no bidding wars for output) I can see this being an amazing optimization, especially if we hit scaling walls and base models stop being updated so fast.

But right now with constant model updates and 0 fab space? This isn't going into mass production

We should be using AIs to build more fabs, then. Have them design faster RAM and processors, better fabrication methods with higher yields.

The bottle neck is not science. Make them design robots that build physical factories.

Make them design robots that speed run the approvals process for factories.

Make them create a political party that would produce politicians that don't make creating new factories a Kafkian nightmare. That's the AI I would like to support. I mean if we give up on solving human problems as humans and are willing to pass the torch onto AIs, let's go all in.

That was my immediate thought as well. We're obviously not at that point yet. The $64K question is whether we will be in a couple of years or a couple of decades.

Design isn't the bottleneck though. We have designed fabs before, most of the hard part is solved. It's actually building these massive facilities, supplying them with water and energy, keeping them at pressure, staffing them with technicians, and troubleshooting the million small issues that can eat into yield ratios that is hard. It would take some world changing advancements in robotics or AI just leapfrogging our current understanding of how to build chips for them to make a dent in the difficulty of the process.

If that was trivial, we'd already be living in the singularity and/or matrix.

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