Hacker News with Generative AI: Efficiency

Rigor and Urgency (blueberrypediatrics.blog)
Blueberry is a 24/7 clinic startup. We need to move fast and not break things. This requires us to have a disciplined balance of rigor and urgency.
JEDEC finalizes HBM4 memory standard with major bandwidth and efficiency upgrade (tomshardware.com)
Microsoft’s “1‑bit” AI model runs on a CPU only, while matching larger systems (arstechnica.com)
Future AI might not need supercomputers thanks to models like BitNet b1.58 2B4T.
Microsoft researchers developed a hyper-efficient AI model that can run on CPUs (techcrunch.com)
Microsoft researchers claim they’ve developed the largest-scale 1-bit AI model, also known as a “bitnet,” to date.
Work Simplification and the History of Government Efficiency and Management (governance.fyi)
Dave Deek: Okay, recording has started. How's your week been going?
Show HN: For those who want to stay informed without reading 10 articles (worldpulsenow.com)
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Tao: Using test-time compute to train efficient LLMs without labeled data (databricks.com)
Better Shell History Search (tratt.net)
I spend an awful lot of my day in Unix terminals running shell commands. For some reason, the variance in efficiency between different people when using the shell is huge: I know people who can run rings around me, and I’ve come across more than one paid professional who doesn’t use the “up” key to retrieve the previous command.
LED's Efficiency Exceeds 100% (2012) (phys.org)
For the first time, researchers have demonstrated that an LED can emit more optical power than the electrical power it consumes.
AutoHete: An Automatic and Efficient Heterogeneous Training System for LLMs (arxiv.org)
Transformer-based large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated exceptional capabilities in sequence modeling and text generation, with improvements scaling proportionally with model size.
Command A (cohere.com)
Command A is on par or better than GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 across agentic enterprise tasks, with significantly greater efficiency.
Command A: Max performance, minimal compute – 256k context window (cohere.com)
Command A is on par or better than GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 across agentic enterprise tasks, with significantly greater efficiency.
Cohere's minimal compute new LLM (cohere.com)
Command A is on par or better than GPT-4o and DeepSeek-V3 across agentic enterprise tasks, with significantly greater efficiency.
AMD EPYC 9845 Makes for a Persuasive Upgrade with Performance and Efficiency (phoronix.com)
With the new AMD EPYC 9005 processors there are SKUs up to 500 Watt with the likes of the EPYC 9965 flagship at 192 cores for Turin Dense cores or 128 Turin classic cores with the EPYC 9755. But for those looking at upgrading from an existing EPYC 9004 series server and bound by the motherboard BIOS support and/or cooling/power capacity, 400 Watts is a sweet spot.
Federal employees begin to receive second work accomplishment email (thehill.com)
Federal employees on Friday began receiving a second email asking them to list bullet points on what they did during the past week, as the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) continues to recommend cuts to the workforce.
Speed matters (2021) (scattered-thoughts.net)
I think that one of the most important things to focus on improving is how fast you can work.
On Bloat (docs.google.com)
Are efficiency and horizontal scalability at odds? (buttondown.com)
Why are scalable systems locally-inefficent, and locally-efficient systems unscalable? Plus, new book release!
Fire the Contractors: Paradoxically adding government employees reduces costs (washingtonmonthly.com)
Voters are right to want a less bloated and wasteful government. But Elon Musk’s plan will fail because the most inefficient parts lie outside it.
Department of Government Efficiency Live Tracker (doge-tracker.com)
Fluid Compute (vercel.com)
While dedicated servers provide efficiency and always-on availability, they often lead to over-provisioning, scaling challenges, and operational overhead. Serverless computing improves this with auto-scaling and pay-as-you-go pricing, but can suffer from cold starts and inefficient use of idle time.
Better AI Is a Matter of Timing (ieee.org)
New MEMS-based clocks aim to improve efficiency by reducing idle compute times
Jevons paradox (wikipedia.org)
In economics, the Jevons paradox (/ˈdʒɛvənz/; sometimes Jevons effect) occurs when technological advancements make a resource more efficient to use (thereby reducing the amount needed for a single application), however, as the cost of using the resource drops, overall demand increases causing total resource consumption to rise.
Caltrain's electric fleet more efficient than expected (caltrain.com)
Understanding DOGE as Procurement Capture (anildash.com)
For the last few months, there's been a lot of conversation around the "Department" of Government Efficiency, which is ostensibly an effort at improving government efficency, with a primary narrative being around government spending.
Google CEO reveals major job cuts as part of "efficiency" move (techradar.com)
I replaced my son's school timetable app with an e-paper (mfasold.net)
Recently, I’ve been looking for a quality-of-life improvement for our family’s morning routine: the daily check of the timetable and substitution plan for the kids’ school.
Switching to the meow modal editing system from evil Emacs (esrh.me)
The first modal editing system I used was vim. After the initial learning curve that comes with getting used to not being able to type in every mode, it introduced me to a few key ideas that I feel lead to decidedly more efficient editing
1-Bit AI Infrastructure (arxiv.org)
Recent advances in 1-bit Large Language Models (LLMs), such as BitNet and BitNet b1.58, present a promising approach to enhancing the efficiency of LLMs in terms of speed and energy consumption.
1-bit architecture is turbocharging LLM efficiency (venturebeat.com)
One-bit large language models (LLMs) have emerged as a promising approach to making generative AI more accessible and affordable.