There has been a lot of interest in this going back to at least early this year and the 1.58bit LLM (ternary) logic paper https://arxiv.org/abs/2402.17764 so expect there has been a research gold rush and a lot of design effort going into producing custom hardware almost immediately that was revealed.
With Nvidia dual chip GB200 Grace Blackwell offering (sparse) 40Pflop fp4 at ~1kW there has already been something close to optimal hardware available - that fp4 performance may have been the reason the latest generation Nvidia GPU are in such high demand - previous generations haven't offered it as far as I am aware. For comparison a human brain is likely equivalent to 10-100Pflops, though estimates vary.
Being able to up the performance significantly from a single AI chip has huge system cost benefits.
All suggesting that the costs for AI are going to drop yet again, and human level AGI operating costs are going to be measured in cents per hour when it arrives in a few years time.
The implications for autonomous robotics are likely tremendous, with potential OOM power savings likely to bring far more capable systems to smaller platforms, home robotics, fsd cars, and (scarily) military murderbots. Tesla has (according to Elon comments) a new HW5 autonomy chip coming out next year that is ~50x faster than their current FSD development baseline HW3 2 x 72Tflop chipset, but needs closer to 1kW power, so they will be extremely keen on implementing something that could save so much power.
AI safety desperately needs to buy in or persuade some high profile talent to raise public awareness. Business as usual approach of last decade is clearly not working - we are sleep walking towards the cliff. Given how timelines are collapsing the problem to be solved has morphed from being a technical one to a pressing social one - we have to get enough people clamouring for a halt that politicians will start to prioritise appeasing them ahead of their big tech donors.
It probably wouldn't be expensive to rent a few high profile influencers with major reach amongst impressionable youth. A demographic that is easily convinced to buy into and campaign against end of the world causes.
Current Nvidia GPU prices are highly distorted by scarcity, with profit margins that are reportedly in the 80-90% of sale price range: https://www.tomshardware.com/news/nvidia-makes-1000-profit-on-h100-gpus-report
If these were commodified to the point that scarcity didn't influence price then that $/flop point would seemingly leap up by an order of magnitude to above 1e15Flop/$1000 scraping the top of that curve, ie near brain equivalence computation power in $3.5k manufactured hardware cost, and latest Blackwell GPU has lifted that performance by another 2.5x with little extra manufacturing cost. Humans as useful economic contributors are so screwed, even with successful alignment the socioeconomic implications are beyond cataclysmic.
I'm going through this too with my kids. I don't think there is anything I can do educationally to better ensure they thrive as adults other than making sure I teach them practical/physical build and repair skills (likely to be the area where humans with a combination of brains and dexterity retain useful value longer than any other).
Outside of that the other thing I can do is try to ensure that they have social status and financial/asset nest egg from me, because there is a good chance that the egalitarian ability to lift oneself through effort is going to largely evaporate as human labour becomes less and less valuable, and I can't help but wonder how we are going to decide who gets the nice beach-house. If humans are still in control of an increasingly non-egalitarian world then society will almost certainly slide towards it's corrupt old aristocratic/rentier ways and it becomes all about being part of the Nomenklature (communist elites).
[disclaimer: I am a heat pump technology developer, however the following is just low-effort notes and mental calcs of low reliability, they may be of interest to some. YMMV]
It may be better to invest in improved insulation.
As rough rule of thumb COP is = eff * Theat/(Theat-Tcold), with Temperatures measured in absolute degrees (Kelvin or Rankine), eff for most domestic heat pumps is in range 0.35 to 0.45, high quality european units are often best for COP due to long history of higher power costs - but they are very expensive, frequently $10-20k
Looking at the COP for the unit you quoted the eff is only about 0.25 at rated conditions, not good, unless you get a much larger unit and run it at a less powerful more efficient load point.
That's a pretty huge electricity price, about 4.5x gas price (which is distorted-market nuts, 3x is more usual globally). Given that differential it might be better to look at an absorption heat pump like https://www.robur.com/products/k18-simplygas-heat-pump that gives up to 1.7x gas heat - though they look to be on the order of $10k.
Here's an annoying fact; If you ran that $2/therm gas (~$0.07/kWh) through a reasonably efficient (~40%) natural gas genset it would produce electricity cheaper than what you currently pay for power, and you would have 2/3rds of the gas energy left over as heat. A genset in your neighbourhood could provide a few 10's of houses with cheaper electricity and low cost waste heat, though no doubt prevented by regulatory issues. There are a few small combined heat and power (CHP) domestic units on the market, but they tend to be very expensive, more tech-curios than economically sensible.
Niron's Fe16N2 looks to have a maximum energy product (figure of merit for magnet 'strength' up to 120 MGOe at microscopic scale, which is about double that of Neodymium magnets (~60), however only 20 MGOe has been achieved in fabrication. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/am/pii/S0304885319325454
Processing at 1GPa and 200°C isn't that difficult if there is commercial benefit. Synthetic diamonds are made in special pressure vessels at 5GPa and 1500°C. There is some chance that someone will figure out a processing route that makes it possible to achieve bulk crystal orientations that unlocks higher energy products - potential payoff is huge. I expect AGI and ASI will figure out a lot of major improvements in materials science over next 1-2 decades.
I read of a proposal a few months back to achieve brain immortality via introduction of new brain tissue that can be done in a way as to maintain continuity of experience and personality over time. Replenisens , Discussion on a system for doing it in human brains That would perhaps provide a more reliable vector for introduction, as the brain is progressively hybridised with more optimal neural genetic design. Perhaps this could be done more subtly via introduction of 'perfected' stem cells and then some way of increasing rate of die off of old cells.
Instead of gene editing could you just construct a 'perfect' new chromosome and introduce one or more instances of it into existing neurons via viral injection techniques to increase expression of beneficial factors? No particular reason why we can only have 42 🤣46 chromosomes, and this would perhaps side-step difficulties to do with gene editing. Might be a more universal solution too if we could come up with a single or small variety of options for a 'super' brain optimising added chromosome.
Politically the way to pitch it would be for its life saving/enhancement ability - offered for example to people with low intelligence and educational outcomes to offer them a better chance at happiness in life.
"So your job depends on believing the projections about how H2 costs will come down?"
I wouldn't waste my life on something I didn't see as likely - I have no shortage of opportunities in a wide variety of greentech fields. Hydrogen is the most efficient fuel storage 'battery' with 40-50% round-trip energy storage possible. Other synthetic fuels are less efficient but may be necessary for longer term storage or smaller applications. For shipping and aviation however LH2 is the clear and obvious winner.
Desert pv will likely come down in price to consistent ~$0.01-0.02 in next decade with impact of AI on manufacturing, installation and maintenance costs (a few large pv installations are already contracted in this cost range). And electrolysis and liquefaction tech are on track to yield the stated $1.50/kg (learning curves are magic). That 'stranded' desert pv power needs to be delivered to far distant users and hydrogen pipelines or shipping provides most realistic option for doing that.
Capturing carbon for synthetic hydrocarbons is not a trivial issue/cost. And their round trip energy storage efficiencies for synthetics hydrocarbons are worse than for hydrogen. There will still be some applications where they make the most sense. Ammonia might work too, though it also needs hydrogen feedstock and is often lethal when inhaled.
But in general I see a pretty clear path to renewable hydrogen undercutting fossil fuels on cost in the next decade or two, and from there a likely rapid decline in their use - so reasons for optimism about energy part of our civilisational tech stack at least, without breakthroughs in nuclear being needed.
Battery augmented trains: Given normal EV use examples, Tesla et al, and Tesla Semi a charging time of 10% of usage time is relatively normal. Eg charging for 20 minutes and discharging for 3 hours, or in Tesla Semi's case might be more like an hour for 8-10 hours operation but trains have lower drag (and less penalty for weight) than cars or trucks so will go further for same amount of energy. The idea is therefore that you employ a pantograph multi MW charging system on the train that only needs to operate about 10% of the time,. This may reduce electrification capital and maintenance costs. Another option would be battery engines that can join up or disconnect from trains in motion between charging cycles in sidings.
CATL (largest battery producer in the world) are innovating heavily on Sodium ion batteries and have stated that they believe cost per kWh can come down to $40/kWh as they scale up manufacture on their second generation. "CATL first-generation sodium-ion cells cost about 77 USD per kWh, and the second generation with volume production can drop to 40 USD per kWh."
I work professionally developing Liquid hydrogen fueled transport power technology. It's very practical for some applications, particularly aircraft and ships that I expect will transition to hydrogen in next 2-3 decades, and possibly trains and agriculture. Using low cost power sources such as grid scale pv in low cost desert regions the price is expected to come down over next 1-2 decades to being competitive or even undercutting fossil fuels (commonly expected/roadmapped to be ~$1.5/kg H2, which translates to about $0.10/kWh useful output power, similar to fossil fuels before taxes). This is likely the only realistic route to fully renewable power for human civilisation - producing in cheapest sunny or windy areas and using at high latitudes/through winters. But LH2 is difficult to transport, transfer and employ at small scales due to lack of economic cryocooling and complexity, insulation and cost scale (r² vs r³) issues with tanks (LH2 and GH2 are very low density) and GH2 is even worse for non-pipeline distribution, so a more convenient dense and long-term easily and cheaply stored energy carrier such as Ammonia or synthetic hydrocarbons made using future cheap hydrogen feedstocks may be a better option. That is especially true for off-road uses.
Agriculture is particularly intractable, cropping farmers in my region frequently run 100+ hours a week using many MW of power during harvest which is a terrible issue for power economics without exceptionally cheap energy storage - liquid fuel is probably the only economic option.
And yes I am well aware of mining electrification, but I am very suspicious of it's utility given many cases will see it powered by fossil fuel generation. Likely that a lot of it is PR greenwashing rather than effective CO2 reduction.
They cannot just add an OOM of parameters, much less three.
How about 2 OOM's?
HW2.5 21Tflops HW3 72x2 = 72 Tflops (redundant), HW4 3x72=216Tflops (not sure about redundancy) and Elon said in June that next gen AI5 chip for fsd would be about 10x faster say ~2Pflops
By rough approximation to brain processing power you get about 0.1Pflop per gram of brain so HW2.5 might have been a 0.2g baby mouse brain, HW3 a 1g baby rat brain HW4 perhaps adult rat, and upcoming HW5 a 20g small cat brain.
As a real world analogue cat to dog (25-100g brain) seems to me the minimum necessary range of complexity based on behavioral capabilities to do a decent job of driving - need some ability to anticipate and predict motivations and behavior of other road users and something beyond dumb reactive handling (ie somewhat predictive) to understand anomalous objects that exist on and around roads.
Nvidia Blackwell B200 can do up to about 10pflops of FP8, which is getting into large dog/wolf brain processing range, and wouldn't be unreasonable to package in a self driving car once down closer to manufacturing cost in a few years at around 1kW peak power consumption.
I don't think the rat brain HW4 is going to cut it, and I suspect that internal to Tesla they know it too, but it's going to be crazy expensive to own up to it, better to keep kicking the can down the road with promises until they can deliver the real thing. AI5 might just do it, but wouldn't be surprising to need a further oom to Nvidia Blackwell equivalent and maybe $10k extra cost to get there.