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> The facilities will reportedly consume as much as 13 percent of the plant's output. Why are AI products being shipped so aggressively despite being so ineffi
by reqo 3y ago
> The facilities will reportedly consume as much as 13 percent of the plant's output.
Why are AI products being shipped so aggressively despite being so inefficient? Is code autocompletion and generating random images really worth so much electricity? Shouldn’t we wait until the research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first?
- tithe 3y agoFor the same reason HDD companies shipped 100, 200, 300... GB drives instead of jumping straight to 1 TB: there's money to be made in the middle.
- jjcm 3y ago> Shouldn't we wait until research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first? A scalable architecture has a prerequisite of known product requirements and known implementation specs. Neither is true right now as this field is evolving at a crazy rate. Approaches like what Groq has are great for increasing efficiency, but at the cost of flexibility. Early on in any technology flexibility is imperative until product/market fit is established more clearly. Also reducing this to autocompletion/generating random images really reduces what AI actually is. Those are two use cases for a very generalizable area.
- ajmurmann 3y agoWhat a bizarre question. Me and many others are paying $20+ for these services. The electricity cost is already priced in and subscribers looks at the price and are fine with that price. If the price comes from dev costs, electricity, capital expenses etc. is irrelevant. There are really no alternatives either (well, I could go to 99Designs, pay $100 and wait days). People pay a lot for this and every day new use cases get discovered, so clearly more services like this get built. Edit: " Shouldn’t we wait until the research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first?" Who is "we"? If I think I can offer a product that uses AI and after paying API requests to OpenAI I can turn a profit, I'll build it. API requests will only get cheaper, but why should I wait for that if I can turn a profit now?
- webdood90 3y agoAh, a true capitalist mind. The only consideration is the almighty dollar! Perhaps it would be better for it to be efficient because it uses less energy and in general is a good thing to do for the world. I understand there aren't financial incentives around that so it's probably difficult for you to agree with. Edit: It seems simply suggesting we do better is enough for people to lose their minds.
- not-my-account 3y agoHow aren’t there financial incentives for using less energy? The production of energy costs money.
- webdood90 3y agoI didn't suggest otherwise. The person I replied to said it was a bizarre question, which I disagree with. Their are obvious benefits outside of money.
- not-my-account 3y ago> I understand there aren't financial incentives around that so it's probably difficult for you to agree with.
- webdood90 3y agore: ... in general is a good thing to do for the world
- not-my-account 3y agoAh, thanks for the clarification. Well, since energy costs money, and using less energy is good, isn’t using less energy incentivized?
- not-my-account 3y ago
- TheDudeMan 3y agoIf you want to be last, sure.
- raincole 3y agoYou're promoting a centrally planned economy. In quite a literal way.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoAre they? It could be a tax to offset the externalities that are currently being socialized by keeping other coal plants running to sustain existing homes, farms, factories, etc.
- exe34 3y agoShouldn't that be factored into the price of electricity? I think the market economy ideal is that if houses can't afford enough electricity for heating, then they need to be insulated and/or install heat pumps, etc.
- jabits 3y agoMaybe it’s time to build new power plants, preferably nuclear, and continue efforts to learn about and expand efficient energy sources. No society has ever advanced without ample energy supplies.
- kolinko 3y agoThat’s already being done, and the taxes/limits on co2 pollution will be increasing. So nothing new here. What you’re implicitly suggesting is government allowing/banning certain uses of technology because they are deemed not worthy. That is an autocratic style of thinking.
- paulryanrogers 3y agoWe as a society can decide we don't want our air to become toxic to prop up convoluted gambling schemes. It's only autocratic if it's decided by a single person.
- raincole 3y agoBut all the industries that consume any electricity are already "keeping other coal plants running". If you abitrarily decice a metal processing factory is "worth it" while an AI datacenter isn't, then yes, it's planned economy. And yeah, I know the governments already tax different industries differently. I think these policies are hardly justified and mostly "redistribution by lobbying".
- kkylin 3y agoCory Doctorow has a theory that may be relevant to your question: https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-kind-of-bubble-is-ai/ https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-k... I'm not knowledgeble enough to judge, but am curious what people think.
- AnotherGoodName 3y ago"Is code autocompletion and generating random images really worth so much electricity?" Yes. Very much so. Some back of enveloping. The worldwide labor market is USD$70trillion. If you save 1% of the time of the worldwide labor market (that's quite reasonable for autocomplete etc right?) that's USD$700billion. A quick Google says the global electricity revenues are USD$255billion. So if you have a way to save %1 of human labor it's economically worth tripling power generation to make use of it.
- dieortin 3y agoChatGPT cannot autocomplete a house, or the extraction of minerals from a mine.
- AnotherGoodName 3y agoThe jaquard loom and steam engine can't do those things either. A revolution occurs when a technology saves even a fraction of worldwide labor costs. That's all it needs to do to be literally revolutionary.
- krainboltgreene 3y agoSteam engines were literally created specifically to help with mining, this is so hilariously telling of people into this hype.
- pixl97 3y agoAnd have you studied anything into modern mining yourself? Mines are starting to convert fleets into self driving trucks. Capabilities like image/video recognition that LLMs can do improve their identification and alert systems. Modern AI is a whole lot more than just shitting out spam on the internet.
- peteradio 3y ago> Mines are starting to convert fleets into self driving trucks. What mines?
- bagels 3y agoWhy use an automobile when it can't even fly and run on solar power?
- krainboltgreene 3y agoCall me when this car doesn't crash on the way out of the garage.
- bamboozled 3y agoBecause there is potential money in it and we weren’t already destroying the climate fast enough.
- darby_eight 3y ago[dead]
- bequanna 3y agoI can imagine some septuagenarian dictator thinking the exact same thing and halting all LLM development. How lucky we are to not have a centrally planned economy!
- woopsn 3y agoA problem is that we can't measure how efficient a computing architecture really is, we can only compare them, and not to a hypothetical machine yet to be devised. When AWS can run their datacenter operations 20x more efficiently, which sounds "reasonable to me", they obviously will. Are you criticizing their customers? Or their customers' customers, the ones who like autocomplete? Literally the computer engineers, by whose work these applications have been enabled? I think this is why you were perceived as calling for central planning. Ironically because you took aim at every level but the investors. Growth is aggressive because of the huge investment in the sector currently. Literally because investors want a return. For better or worse there is nobody in the chain who interprets "worthwhile?" in the same sense, and the applications are not essentially relevant to the people in command.
- infecto 3y agoWhy are companies pouring money into LLMs? Well the naysayers like yourself are simply shortsighted and being negative. I think many businesses are already seeing the power of current models in specific processes. You have to assume some natural progression in the coming years to LLMs and the general ecosystem. Since you only reference autocompletion and image gen you obviously have not worked with using LLM in business processes. Is there a lot of hype? Certainly, but there is also a lot of value in the universe today for these models. How do you even define "efficient architecture"? Nobody can define that.