Simulations and pretty much any large scale modelling task. Why do you think people build supercomputers?
Now that I mentioned it, I think supercomputers and the jobs they run are the perfect analog for AI at this stage. It's a problem that we could throw nearly limitless compute at if it were cost effective to do so. HPC encompasses a class of problems for which we have to make compromises because we can't begin to compute the ideal(sort of like using reduced precision in deep-learning). HPC scale problems have always been hard and as we add capabilities we will likely just soak them up to perform more accurate or larger computational tasks.
To quote Andrej Karpathy
(https://x.com/karpathy/status/1883941452738355376): "I will say that Deep Learning has a legendary ravenous appetite for compute, like no other algorithm that has ever been developed in AI. You may not always be utilizing it fully but I would never bet against compute as the upper bound for achievable intelligence in the long run. Not just for an individual final training run, but also for the entire innovation / experimentation engine that silently underlies all the algorithmic innovations."
Now that I mentioned it, I think supercomputers and the jobs they run are the perfect analog for AI at this stage. It's a problem that we could throw nearly limitless compute at if it were cost effective to do so. HPC encompasses a class of problems for which we have to make compromises because we can't begin to compute the ideal(sort of like using reduced precision in deep-learning). HPC scale problems have always been hard and as we add capabilities we will likely just soak them up to perform more accurate or larger computational tasks.
To quote Andrej Karpathy (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1883941452738355376): "I will say that Deep Learning has a legendary ravenous appetite for compute, like no other algorithm that has ever been developed in AI. You may not always be utilizing it fully but I would never bet against compute as the upper bound for achievable intelligence in the long run. Not just for an individual final training run, but also for the entire innovation / experimentation engine that silently underlies all the algorithmic innovations."