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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   26562 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 3, 2024

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"millions or billions of mosquito-sized drones"

The primary problem that needs to be solved here is the power problem, not an intelligence problem. Of course, perhaps there will be an AlphaBattery program along the lines of AlphaFold that focuses on trying to come up with new battery designs, but my kinda-looking-in-from-the-outside view is that the battery folks don't really have a shortage of ideas for new designs; it's the empirical testing work (and things like not having the device explode) that is really the long pole in the tent.

We know that it is physically possible to have mosquito-sized flying machines capable of short-range independent operations. We have an existence proof. They’re called mosquitoes.

Sure, but that doesn't really speak much to how difficult the human engineering problem is... or which aspect of the human engineering problem is the most difficult bottleneck.

This is already beginning to be dealt with. Sam Altman has created a spinoff company 'OKLO' to create small scale fission reactors to power AI server farms. If CES reporting is correct, NVDA's AI server blades are INSANELY power hungry to the point that having their own nuclear reactor might be a cheaper answer than using the power grid.

For transparency - I own some shares of OKLO, so far it's been a pretty lackluster stock pick but I expect decent growth in the medium to long term as long as regulators don't start poopooing it.

I'm pretty sure they're not looking at fission reactors that are small enough to fit on a mosquito-sized drone.

True I looked over that part, but do the drones need individual 'intelligence' or could they be controlled by an AI farm?

I don't think the intelligence part is the bottleneck. It's power for mobility.

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