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Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). Considering the way A

Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). Considering the way AI can potentially bring benefits to humanity, i see it more like an investment. For comparison, Bitcoin in 2021 used 110 TWh, solving a problem we've either solved millenea ago, or could be solved using much less power with premined coins.

klysm 4y ago
I’m not arguing at all that bitcoin is better in this capacity, but I am curious about the estimated MWh required to mine all the metal for all the coins.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  While mining the metal probably hasn't been cheap, it's not as much a recurring cost as the cost of proof-of-work. Besides, in my part of the world at least, i haven't carried cash in a decade or more, and most people i know don't either. Money is increasingly only a digital thing that exists in your (also digital) bank account. Even "micro payments" between individuals is being handled here, for a decade or so, by MobilePay[1] on the domestic side, and PayPal on the international side, with Apple Pay looking to be a close contestant to both, at least for the 55-60% of the population using iPhones. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay
  - leppr 4y ago
    How do you handle the loss of privacy caused by using only non-cryptocurrency digital payments? Any mitigation measures one can take, or is it an all-or nothing proposition to have everything you ever buy logged? Can you see what other citizens buy, or is this privilege reserved to a few bankers, tech companies and government institutions?
    - 8fingerlouie 4y ago
      Government institutions (the tax man mostly) are trying their best to limit the flow of anonymous transactions. Withdrawing a relatively large amount of cash (>=$1500) requires you to sign a form stating your intended purpose with the cash. Depositing a large amount of cash (>$750) requires documentation on how you came by this cash. Crypto is nowhere as anonymous as everybody appears to believe. Every single transaction is on the blockchain, and can be traced from acquisition to being spent. Considering that all European exchanges are now obliged to report their customer details to the authorities (under the KYC of AMLD-V EU directive), it becomes a relatively simple matter to trace your money to crypto transactions. Fortunately, Europe isn’t hit as hard with the customer profiling as the US is, and the EU is rather intent on protecting privacy, so your data purchase history is available only to youths relevant parties. In case of MobilePay, the service provider can of course see the details, but all my bank sees is a text I’ve input when sending money, or what the sender has input. It still gets reported to the tax authorities.
shawabawa3 4y ago
> or could be solved using much less power with premined coins. How? mining new coins doesn't cost energy, preventing double-spends does. Premining wouldn't make any difference Proof of stake or some other non proof of work consensus mechanism could reduce the energy usage
- idlehand 4y ago
  Are there any successful proof of stake coins out there?
  - kolinko 4y ago
    Ethereum is switching to PoS soon
    - pfsalter 4y ago
      I'll believe it when I see it, but it looks like it's been in the pipeline for almost 6 years[1], so I'd be very surprised if we see it before the crypto bubble bursts. [1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-update/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-updat...
  - shawabawa3 4y ago
    Yes, out of the top 15 by market cap there are Cardano Solana Polkadot Tron Avalanche Ethereum is also on a roadmap to migrate to proof of stake
  - michaelscott 4y ago
    The problem isn't viability, it's the fact that PoS re-centralises wealth for almost no cost to the minter which makes it inferior to PoW. The problem with PoW is the green aspect, of course
    - bearjaws 4y ago
      So there is no wealth centralization in BTC or ETH? Oh wait, most mining operations are in the millions of dollars range, nevermind the fact that 84% of all BTC is held by .3% of addresses with > 100 BTC...
m00dy 4y ago
Estimating the energy consumption of a decentralised network and making a concrete assumption about it is just not making sense as claiming bitcoin and traditional finance are on the same ground.
sailingparrot 4y ago
> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). Inference is still done on GPUs, and is not cheap by any means. The number of GPUs you need to run the full 175B GPT-3 model in inference is vastly inferior to what you need during training, but the numbers of replicas of the model running in the backend to serve all customer's requests is vastly superior. So it's more akin to a 747 being bought by OpenAI and kept continuously running than just one transatlantic flight.
- ben_w 4y ago
  Assuming the energy costs $60 per megawatt hour and that OpenAI isn’t making a loss on their “Davinci” tier, that’s 3-7 entire Bibles of output for the $ cost of the cheapest economy seats on the cheapest London to New York flights I found for the rest of this year, or (Edit: I first claimed 25 million) 1.5 billion [0] tokens per flight, using the previously estimated energy cost per 10 hour flight. Their “Ada” tier is 75 times cheaper, with corresponding upper-bounds assumptions if they are not making a loss. [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1500+MWh+*+%2460%2FMWh+%2F+%28%240.0600%2Fthousand+items%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1500+MWh+*+%2460%2FMWh+...
  - wyre 4y ago
    Without a carbon tax comparing the price of two massively energy consuming entities doesn’t mean much of anything in regards to our climate crisis.
    - ben_w 4y ago
      From the point of view of climate change, the fact that data centres are often and increasingly carbon neutral (because that’s the cheapest source of electricity, no carbon tax needed) while jet fuel isn’t usually derived from biofuel means there’s a significant possibility, albeit not a certainty, of a divide by zero error.
- Der_Einzige 4y ago
  CPU inference, even of large transformers, is usually cheaper and is viable with enough strong CPUs.
nurettin 4y ago
>> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). you are right, but never underestimate the collective stupidity of large software departments where they retrain every time someone makes a commit into their CI/CD pipelines.
- ben_w 4y ago
  I hope they’d notice that the server energy bill was higher than the salary cost of the developers making the commits in this hypothetical scenario. That said, hope isn’t generally sufficient, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens in at least one organisation.
andrepd 4y ago
I don't quite understand how a glorified chatbot "brings massive benefits to humanity", nor how a distributed trustless ledger could be achieved millenia ago.
- 8fingerlouie 4y ago
  I was thinking more of areas like early stage cancer detection[1], Fraud Detection[2] or the energy sector[3] As for the glorified chatbot is of course one of the applications of AI, but i refuse to believe it has a very complex model, and the computational power required to use the model is also modest enough that most smartphones can execute it without any noticeable impact on battery life. On the smaller scale, most of Apple's AI stuff is running on-device[4]. From iOS 15 all of Siri's "voice to text" happens on-device as well. While it's probably still a glorified chatbot, i for one enjoy being able to enter "pet autumn 2019" into my photo search bar, and be shown pictures of pets taking during autumn 2019, regardless of location. [1]: https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2021/08/using-machine-learning-to-detect-early-stage-cancers/ https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2021/08/using-machine-... [2]: https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/machine-learning-in-fraud-detection-use-cases-2130bd151b15 https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/machine-learning-in-fraud-de... [3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401219302968 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840121... [4]: https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/api/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/api/
- adamsmith143 4y ago
  Why create a strawman, they said AI can bring benefits not GPT3
iroh2727 4y ago
Just curious, what concretely is “the way AI can potentially bring benefits to humanity”?

klysm 4y ago

I’m not arguing at all that bitcoin is better in this capacity, but I am curious about the estimated MWh required to mine all the metal for all the coins.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
While mining the metal probably hasn't been cheap, it's not as much a recurring cost as the cost of proof-of-work. Besides, in my part of the world at least, i haven't carried cash in a decade or more, and most people i know don't either. Money is increasingly only a digital thing that exists in your (also digital) bank account. Even "micro payments" between individuals is being handled here, for a decade or so, by MobilePay[1] on the domestic side, and PayPal on the international side, with Apple Pay looking to be a close contestant to both, at least for the 55-60% of the population using iPhones. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MobilePay
- leppr 4y ago
  How do you handle the loss of privacy caused by using only non-cryptocurrency digital payments? Any mitigation measures one can take, or is it an all-or nothing proposition to have everything you ever buy logged? Can you see what other citizens buy, or is this privilege reserved to a few bankers, tech companies and government institutions?
  - 8fingerlouie 4y ago
    Government institutions (the tax man mostly) are trying their best to limit the flow of anonymous transactions. Withdrawing a relatively large amount of cash (>=$1500) requires you to sign a form stating your intended purpose with the cash. Depositing a large amount of cash (>$750) requires documentation on how you came by this cash. Crypto is nowhere as anonymous as everybody appears to believe. Every single transaction is on the blockchain, and can be traced from acquisition to being spent. Considering that all European exchanges are now obliged to report their customer details to the authorities (under the KYC of AMLD-V EU directive), it becomes a relatively simple matter to trace your money to crypto transactions. Fortunately, Europe isn’t hit as hard with the customer profiling as the US is, and the EU is rather intent on protecting privacy, so your data purchase history is available only to youths relevant parties. In case of MobilePay, the service provider can of course see the details, but all my bank sees is a text I’ve input when sending money, or what the sender has input. It still gets reported to the tax authorities.

shawabawa3 4y ago

> or could be solved using much less power with premined coins. How? mining new coins doesn't cost energy, preventing double-spends does. Premining wouldn't make any difference Proof of stake or some other non proof of work consensus mechanism could reduce the energy usage

idlehand 4y ago
Are there any successful proof of stake coins out there?
- kolinko 4y ago
  Ethereum is switching to PoS soon
  - pfsalter 4y ago
    I'll believe it when I see it, but it looks like it's been in the pipeline for almost 6 years[1], so I'd be very surprised if we see it before the crypto bubble bursts. [1] https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-update/ https://blog.ethereum.org/2016/12/04/ethereum-research-updat...
- shawabawa3 4y ago
  Yes, out of the top 15 by market cap there are Cardano Solana Polkadot Tron Avalanche Ethereum is also on a roadmap to migrate to proof of stake
- michaelscott 4y ago
  The problem isn't viability, it's the fact that PoS re-centralises wealth for almost no cost to the minter which makes it inferior to PoW. The problem with PoW is the green aspect, of course
  - bearjaws 4y ago
    So there is no wealth centralization in BTC or ETH? Oh wait, most mining operations are in the millions of dollars range, nevermind the fact that 84% of all BTC is held by .3% of addresses with > 100 BTC...

m00dy 4y ago

Estimating the energy consumption of a decentralised network and making a concrete assumption about it is just not making sense as claiming bitcoin and traditional finance are on the same ground.

sailingparrot 4y ago

> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). Inference is still done on GPUs, and is not cheap by any means. The number of GPUs you need to run the full 175B GPT-3 model in inference is vastly inferior to what you need during training, but the numbers of replicas of the model running in the backend to serve all customer's requests is vastly superior. So it's more akin to a 747 being bought by OpenAI and kept continuously running than just one transatlantic flight.

ben_w 4y ago
Assuming the energy costs $60 per megawatt hour and that OpenAI isn’t making a loss on their “Davinci” tier, that’s 3-7 entire Bibles of output for the $ cost of the cheapest economy seats on the cheapest London to New York flights I found for the rest of this year, or (Edit: I first claimed 25 million) 1.5 billion [0] tokens per flight, using the previously estimated energy cost per 10 hour flight. Their “Ada” tier is 75 times cheaper, with corresponding upper-bounds assumptions if they are not making a loss. [0] https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1500+MWh+*+%2460%2FMWh+%2F+%28%240.0600%2Fthousand+items%29 https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=1500+MWh+*+%2460%2FMWh+...
- wyre 4y ago
  Without a carbon tax comparing the price of two massively energy consuming entities doesn’t mean much of anything in regards to our climate crisis.
  - ben_w 4y ago
    From the point of view of climate change, the fact that data centres are often and increasingly carbon neutral (because that’s the cheapest source of electricity, no carbon tax needed) while jet fuel isn’t usually derived from biofuel means there’s a significant possibility, albeit not a certainty, of a divide by zero error.
Der_Einzige 4y ago
CPU inference, even of large transformers, is usually cheaper and is viable with enough strong CPUs.

nurettin 4y ago

>> Not to mention that training a model is a "one time deal", where a successfully trained model can be reused by a lot of client (devices). you are right, but never underestimate the collective stupidity of large software departments where they retrain every time someone makes a commit into their CI/CD pipelines.

ben_w 4y ago
I hope they’d notice that the server energy bill was higher than the salary cost of the developers making the commits in this hypothetical scenario. That said, hope isn’t generally sufficient, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it happens in at least one organisation.

andrepd 4y ago

I don't quite understand how a glorified chatbot "brings massive benefits to humanity", nor how a distributed trustless ledger could be achieved millenia ago.

8fingerlouie 4y ago
I was thinking more of areas like early stage cancer detection[1], Fraud Detection[2] or the energy sector[3] As for the glorified chatbot is of course one of the applications of AI, but i refuse to believe it has a very complex model, and the computational power required to use the model is also modest enough that most smartphones can execute it without any noticeable impact on battery life. On the smaller scale, most of Apple's AI stuff is running on-device[4]. From iOS 15 all of Siri's "voice to text" happens on-device as well. While it's probably still a glorified chatbot, i for one enjoy being able to enter "pet autumn 2019" into my photo search bar, and be shown pictures of pets taking during autumn 2019, regardless of location. [1]: https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2021/08/using-machine-learning-to-detect-early-stage-cancers/ https://engineering.berkeley.edu/news/2021/08/using-machine-... [2]: https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/machine-learning-in-fraud-detection-use-cases-2130bd151b15 https://medium.com/mlearning-ai/machine-learning-in-fraud-de... [3]: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0268401219302968 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S026840121... [4]: https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/api/ https://developer.apple.com/machine-learning/api/
adamsmith143 4y ago
Why create a strawman, they said AI can bring benefits not GPT3

iroh2727 4y ago

Just curious, what concretely is “the way AI can potentially bring benefits to humanity”?