"The Obscene Energy Demands of A.I." - hackernews discussion - eviltoast

HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the “obscene energy demands of AI” with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm???

Maybe it’s just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what’s arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

        • gerikson@awful.systemsOPEnglish
          11·
          9 months ago

          From your syntax I can divine that you are mad at me (or rather, my submission) but for the life of me I don’t understand why. Is it because I wrote “AI” instead of “the bad AI from BigTech using TWh to generate shitty hero images for blogs but not the good AI from the heroic researchers constructing our glorious future for the pure love of science” ?

          If so, nothing would please me more than for the “bad AI” to crash and burn, pauperize Sam Altman and all his bootlickers, and AI research to retreat to the academic caves to hibernate another AI winter.

          • froztbyte@awful.systemsEnglish
            7·
            9 months ago

            every time I see responses like that I’m left wondering if it’s from someone working in (or closely adjacent to) the field. someone with some eyes on the potential and Big Mad about the bullshit, but feeling unable to affect it in any manner

            a charitable interpretation (and wishful thinking perhaps?), but still

          • 1stTime4MeInMCU@mander.xyzEnglish
            14·
            9 months ago

            I’m not mad at you at all, i basically agreed with you. i was just engaging in a more nuanced discussion…. Or trying to. the replies here seem fairly hostile so I think I’ll see myself out of this community.

            • self@awful.systemsEnglish
              10·
              9 months ago

              ah yes, the type of nuance that can’t survive even the extremely mild amount of pushback you’ve experienced in this thread. but since we’re “fairly hostile” and all that, how about I make sure your lying AI-pushing ass can’t show up in any of our threads again

              I should’ve known taking my time to explain our stance was a waste of my fucking time when you brought up nuance in the first place — the only time I see you shitheads give a fuck about that is when you’re looking to shift the Overton window while pretending to take a centrist position

    • self@awful.systemsEnglish
      13·
      9 months ago
      1. It will get better, and in the case of language models, that could have profound impacts on society

      why is that a given?

      the materials research Deepmind published

      these results were extremely flawed and disappointing, in a way that’s highly reminiscent of the Bell Labs replication crisis

      1. There are other things being researched that are equally important that get little daylight, such as robotics and agentic AIs

      these get brought up a lot in marketing, but the academic results of attempting to apply LLMs and generative AI to these fields have also been extremely disappointing

      if you’re here seeking nuance, I encourage you to learn more about the history of academic fraud that occurred during the first AI boom and led directly to the AI winter. the tragedy of AI as a field is that all of the obvious fraud is and was treated with the same respect as the occasional truly useful computational technique

      I also encourage you to learn more about the Rationalist cult that steers a lot of decisions around AI (and especially AI with an AGI end goal) research. the communities on this instance have a long history of sneering at the Rationalists who would (years later) go on to become key researchers at essentially every large AI company, and that history has shaped the language we use. the podcast Behind the Bastards has a couple of episodes about the Rationalist cult and its relationship with AI research, and Robert Evans definitely does a better job describing it than I can

    • David Gerard@awful.systemsMEnglish
      10·
      9 months ago

      this is the general argument in favour of cryptocurrency, with the name changed. you don’t seem to have argued that the actual reality of AI we have right now is not the same problem.

      • 1stTime4MeInMCU@mander.xyzEnglish
        44·
        9 months ago

        Because I’m not arguing with OP, I’m largely agreeing with them. Generating silly images and doing school kids homework is not the promised land of AI the corporate overlords keep promising. But that’s not to suggest the field in general has zero uses. Crypto and AI are apples and oranges and while I’m not exactly sure what you mean by the arguments being the same, it would be possible for the same argument to be true for AI and not true for crypto, because AI has much more obvious use cases to benefit the common good.

    • corbin@awful.systemsEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      I hear what you’re saying, but I think it’s sort of a motte-and-bailey setup:

      Motte: Many functions can be probably approximately learned, even some uncomputable functions

      Bailey: Consciousness, appreciation for art, useful laboring, and careful argumentation are learnable functions

    • skillissuer@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
      9·
      9 months ago

      There are other kinds of AI use cases, such as alphafold and the materials research Deepmind published

      alphafold is mostly pattern matching on known proteins and the other bit, well google very quickly distanced themselves from these shitty results when they learned how shitty they are. i’ve made a post about it specifically https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/11138402 and i won’t rewrite it again