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Arguably, that was the defense for cryptocurrency too. "Oh, power consumption? Totally on our radar... what if we switch to Proof of Work? Personally, I don't

Arguably, that was the defense for cryptocurrency too. "Oh, power consumption? Totally on our radar... what if we switch to Proof of Work? Personally, I don't think power consumption is the only legitimate argument against the application of GPT. There's the fact that it's proprietary, unreliable and even consistently wrong on certain topics. It's expensive to apply at-scale and most AI-generated text sounds sterile and impersonal. Even now, after years of development, GPT is too unreliable to be called anything other than a novelty. The dream of a "suitable application" for AI is like the dream of a "suitable application" for the blockchain. Both are technology-first solutions to social problems. Cool in concept, but regularly broken in execution.

zozbot234 4y ago
> Personally, I don't think power consumption is the only legitimate argument against the application of GPT. Well, it depends what you mean by "the application of GPT". As a toy and a technical proof of concept, it works quite well. The problem is that people want something that's mostly correct and won't just make stuff up - and that's just not what GPT is for.
- smoldesu 4y ago
  Right. Fiction-as-a-service is a fantastical API, but not a very practical one. When you boil it down, you're paying a lot of money for some carefully-arranged noise to get sent over the internet.
rstuart4133 4y ago
> "Oh, power consumption? Totally on our radar... what if we switch to Proof of Work? I think you meant "Proof of Stake". But yes, when Bitcoin hit the transaction limit years ago it's hard to understate just how much on the radar it was. Differences in opinion on how to solve it was the root cause of the Bitcoin Cash fork. There are two solutions floating about now - proof of stake and Lightning. Being completely distributed Lightning is near infinitely scalable, to the extent that it may well end up being the cheapest global currency we have. Thus crypto has made big leaps forwards on it's scaling issues. If your analogy is correct then AI will do the same. But if it follows the same pattern, it will take decades.

zozbot234 4y ago

> Personally, I don't think power consumption is the only legitimate argument against the application of GPT. Well, it depends what you mean by "the application of GPT". As a toy and a technical proof of concept, it works quite well. The problem is that people want something that's mostly correct and won't just make stuff up - and that's just not what GPT is for.

smoldesu 4y ago
Right. Fiction-as-a-service is a fantastical API, but not a very practical one. When you boil it down, you're paying a lot of money for some carefully-arranged noise to get sent over the internet.

rstuart4133 4y ago

> "Oh, power consumption? Totally on our radar... what if we switch to Proof of Work? I think you meant "Proof of Stake". But yes, when Bitcoin hit the transaction limit years ago it's hard to understate just how much on the radar it was. Differences in opinion on how to solve it was the root cause of the Bitcoin Cash fork. There are two solutions floating about now - proof of stake and Lightning. Being completely distributed Lightning is near infinitely scalable, to the extent that it may well end up being the cheapest global currency we have. Thus crypto has made big leaps forwards on it's scaling issues. If your analogy is correct then AI will do the same. But if it follows the same pattern, it will take decades.