alt Hacker NewsI grew up in a time when listening to an mp3 was too computationally expensive and nigh impossible for the average desktop. Now tiny phones can decode high def video realtime due to CPU extensions.
And my phone uses a tiny, tiny amount of power, comparatively, to do so.
CPU extensions and other improvements will make AI a simple, tiny task. Many of the improvements will come from robotics.
At a certain point Moore's Law died and that point was about 20 years ago but fortunately for MP3s, it happened after MP3 became easily usable. There's no point in comparing anything before 2005 or so from that perspective.
We have long entered an era where computing is becoming more expensive and power hungry, we're just lucky regular computer usage has largely plateaued at a level where the already obtained performance is good enough.
But major leaps are a lot more costly these days.