 Perhaps I can now, finally, know peace. What they're calling #AI is inevitable because it's just computers, computing, and computers already exist and are everywhere. We cannot stop it, unless you have a plan to stop all computing, forever. Meanwhile, AI products are becoming more useful to people all the time. So, when it comes to critique of AI, we have to up our game if we want a future worth living in. https://redeem-tomorrow.com/the-average-ai-criticism-has-gotten-lazy-and-thats-dangerous 11 comments
@glyph that's super interesting context! four fucking orders of magnitude… yeah, I'll drop a link in, do you have a citation on the GPT-3 training energy costs?  @danilo (But I was being perhaps overgenerous to Bitcoin; 100TWh was more of a 2021 number, it's gone up more than 25% since: https://rmi.org/cryptocurrencys-energy-consumption-problem/#:~:text=Cryptocurrency%20has%20an%20energy%20consumption,than%20many%20countries%2C%20including%20Norway.) @glyph yeah, that's a pretty wild gulf right there and again, the incentive is to drive down consumption and improve efficiency, so the long term trend looks like computing's performance per watt trend, not bitcoin’s tire fire everyone who wants to do this self-righteous finger wagging bullshit about AI’s energy impact needs to explain what we’re going to do about the hundreds of terawatts of mundane data center energy expenditure that’s ALREADY HAPPENING, orders of magnitude greater than AI This is a software engineer writing this. If the future of AI must be stopped on energy grounds, shouldn’t all technologists put down tools and disrupt their nearest data center? It’s absolutely incoherent. If a social worker wants to make this argument, a person who builds houses, I think they have a little more standing But every software professional who keeps going to work pays their rent or mortgage on the back of ENORMOUS energy usage, an entire constellation of devices burning energy, on a rack, in the home, pockets Deciding we can’t build more data centers because that’s bad for the earth, but accepting existing data centers doing a different category of computing that pays your bills… |
Gregory's Server
@danilo re: your energy critique, I was eagerly reading to see if you had gotten better stats than I had previously found, but I didn't see any. I don't know if it's worth editing to update, but I was saying exactly this last month: https://mastodon.social/@glyph/111251549055579334