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Is there actual demand for AI? I don't think there is. It's just being shoved down everyone's throat unwittingly.

by bmitc 3y ago

krasin 3y ago
In the question of datacenter water usage, its application (AI or not) is actually not very relevant to the problem at hand. I challenge the fact why (if true) the datacenters even need "new" water, instead of having a closed system with full recirculation of water.
- landemva 3y ago
  > instead of having a closed system with full recirculation of water. The water would need to be cooled before reuse, which could look like a car radiator and fan. It's about cost, and new water is likely cheaper when dumping heat from the fixed location of the data center.
  - krasin 3y ago
    > The water would need to be cooled before reuse, which could look like a car radiator and fan. Dry cooling tower is the word, I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
  - jj999 3y ago
    it's only cheaper because the cost is externalized.
throwawa14223 3y ago
Everyone thinks their AI product is the one that consumers will finally want. It's like the Cambrian explosion of coins except those didn't involve scraping all of our personal data.
- EGreg 3y ago
  It’s the next Web3. Comes and goes in waves. Cue the AI fanbois saying “well actually, AI has a ton of positive uses because I recognize them, while Web3 has none, because I won’t recognize any uses as valid” The upsides are only one part of the equation, the downsides of AI are destruction of all trust in digital media and claims, chaos on the web and social forums, job loss on a massive scale and and possible human exinction. AI will affect you with downsides whether you want it or not. By contrast the downsides of Web3 are bugs in smart contracts that can make some people lose some of the money that they voluntarily sent over to that contract.
- delfinom 3y ago
  It's a repeat of Home Assistants heh Amazing how much all the companies forgot how the bumrush of Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana went
rocketnasa 3y ago
I think there is huge demand and faith from corporate executives. They can secretly propose their wild ideas without any employee resignations, ethics concerns (spending millions on a contract, you won't get consumer-restricted "safe" AI), etc. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
wincy 3y ago
Maybe everyone else on Hacker News are all super geniuses who don’t benefit from it, but I’m a developer about 9 years into my career and have found ChatGPT4 to be absolutely astonishing for helping me learn new skills and improve my productivity. It helped me figure out the design flaws that were causing me considerable difficulties when writing some generics, and we’ve got a new subsystem in an important product up and running that ChatGPT helped me and the other engineers design. Furthermore I use GitHub Copilot literally every day. The combo of chatGPT for “big picture” discussions and copilot for writing code feels like I iterate faster and learn all sorts of things I wouldn’t dredge up in the documentation, or just wouldn’t feel like I had time for (like using Theories instead of Facts in a unit test and running multiple sets of data through the test, I was vaguely aware of it but just hadn’t done it). I’ve made amazing art for my entire D&D party. I’ve got at least a few hundred hours racked up on Colab Premium renting A100s and generating pictures and iterating until I get something really really nice in an hour or two. Someone offered me $250 to make him a picture using the pretty standard Stable Diffusion toolset after I showed him some of the stuff I’ve made. I don’t see how people aren’t absolutely amazed at what these tools can accomplish, and they’re just going to get better. To be clear, I didn’t buy a single crypto coin and thought Web3 was total snake oil (still do), despite my friend literally making millions of dollars off of Bitcoin. But I think this is a radically different situation and the benefits (at least in the short term to someone like me, who is already technical) seem overwhelming and obvious.
mindwok 3y ago
ChatGPT had over 100 million users a few months after launch, the demand is there.
Zpalmtree 3y ago
I and a lot of other devs I know use chatgpt to assist then in various capabilities, be it writing code, debugging errors, setting up environments or suggesting libraries. Other non devs enjoy humorous queries with chatgpt and other less constrained models, image generation is also popular

Is there actual demand for AI? I don't think there is. It's just being shoved down everyone's throat unwittingly.

by bmitc 3y ago

Is there actual demand for AI? I don't think there is. It's just being shoved down everyone's throat unwittingly.

In the question of datacenter water usage, its application (AI or not) is actually not very relevant to the problem at hand. I challenge the fact why (if true) the datacenters even need "new" water, instead of having a closed system with full recirculation of water.

landemva 3y ago
> instead of having a closed system with full recirculation of water. The water would need to be cooled before reuse, which could look like a car radiator and fan. It's about cost, and new water is likely cheaper when dumping heat from the fixed location of the data center.
- krasin 3y ago
  > The water would need to be cooled before reuse, which could look like a car radiator and fan. Dry cooling tower is the word, I believe: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cooling_tower
- jj999 3y ago
  it's only cheaper because the cost is externalized.

throwawa14223 3y ago

Everyone thinks their AI product is the one that consumers will finally want. It's like the Cambrian explosion of coins except those didn't involve scraping all of our personal data.

EGreg 3y ago
It’s the next Web3. Comes and goes in waves. Cue the AI fanbois saying “well actually, AI has a ton of positive uses because I recognize them, while Web3 has none, because I won’t recognize any uses as valid” The upsides are only one part of the equation, the downsides of AI are destruction of all trust in digital media and claims, chaos on the web and social forums, job loss on a massive scale and and possible human exinction. AI will affect you with downsides whether you want it or not. By contrast the downsides of Web3 are bugs in smart contracts that can make some people lose some of the money that they voluntarily sent over to that contract.
delfinom 3y ago
It's a repeat of Home Assistants heh Amazing how much all the companies forgot how the bumrush of Alexa, Google Assistant, Siri and Cortana went

rocketnasa 3y ago

I think there is huge demand and faith from corporate executives. They can secretly propose their wild ideas without any employee resignations, ethics concerns (spending millions on a contract, you won't get consumer-restricted "safe" AI), etc. Don’t give yourselves to these unnatural men - machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have the love of humanity in your hearts! You don’t hate! Only the unloved hate - the unloved and the unnatural! Soldiers! Don’t fight for slavery! Fight for liberty!

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

wincy 3y ago

Maybe everyone else on Hacker News are all super geniuses who don’t benefit from it, but I’m a developer about 9 years into my career and have found ChatGPT4 to be absolutely astonishing for helping me learn new skills and improve my productivity. It helped me figure out the design flaws that were causing me considerable difficulties when writing some generics, and we’ve got a new subsystem in an important product up and running that ChatGPT helped me and the other engineers design. Furthermore I use GitHub Copilot literally every day. The combo of chatGPT for “big picture” discussions and copilot for writing code feels like I iterate faster and learn all sorts of things I wouldn’t dredge up in the documentation, or just wouldn’t feel like I had time for (like using Theories instead of Facts in a unit test and running multiple sets of data through the test, I was vaguely aware of it but just hadn’t done it). I’ve made amazing art for my entire D&D party. I’ve got at least a few hundred hours racked up on Colab Premium renting A100s and generating pictures and iterating until I get something really really nice in an hour or two. Someone offered me $250 to make him a picture using the pretty standard Stable Diffusion toolset after I showed him some of the stuff I’ve made. I don’t see how people aren’t absolutely amazed at what these tools can accomplish, and they’re just going to get better. To be clear, I didn’t buy a single crypto coin and thought Web3 was total snake oil (still do), despite my friend literally making millions of dollars off of Bitcoin. But I think this is a radically different situation and the benefits (at least in the short term to someone like me, who is already technical) seem overwhelming and obvious.

mindwok 3y ago

ChatGPT had over 100 million users a few months after launch, the demand is there.

Zpalmtree 3y ago

I and a lot of other devs I know use chatgpt to assist then in various capabilities, be it writing code, debugging errors, setting up environments or suggesting libraries. Other non devs enjoy humorous queries with chatgpt and other less constrained models, image generation is also popular