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What 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

• webdood90 3y ago
  Ah, 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 ago
    How aren’t there financial incentives for using less energy? The production of energy costs money.
    • webdood90 3y ago
      I 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 ago
          re: ... in general is a good thing to do for the world
          • not-my-account 3y ago
            Ah, 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
            Unless you’re making a more general point “good things are not incentivized”, which I feel is a difficult thing to argue or make statements about
  • deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  • richard___ 3y ago
    [flagged]
  • apantel 3y ago
    I don’t think you would want to live in the world we’d have if we rolled back all of the energy expenditure done in the name of profit over the past 200 years since the discovery of oil. You wouldn’t have anything. You wouldn’t be able to cross the Atlantic lest you burn coal to produce steam.
    • reactordev 3y ago
      As a sailor, who crossed oceans, on nothing but wind power (and solar), I resent that - but I totally get what you’re saying. The world would be, different, to say the least.
    • TheRoque 3y ago
      That's a bit easy to say this. "We progressed during capitalism hence capitalism allowed the progress" but you don't know at all. You also don't know how will the next 1000 years look if we continue to do things in the name of profit. I think that making hypothetical branches like that is just useless because there are so many more factors that just "capitalism or communism"
  • infecto 3y ago
    I was going to respond in sarcasm but realized your comment does not even deserve that. Governments of any shape are unable to accurately pick which industry to allow or prevent. Even harder would be creating legislation that carves out specific industry. You can tax the externalities of the use of electricity. Please don’t create pandering comments with zero substance. I don’t like bitcoin but who am I to tell people what to spend money on.
    • chii 3y ago
      > Governments of any shape are unable to accurately pick which industry to allow or prevent. i would say that some gov'ts in the world does do this - famously the chinese CCP. They dictate by providing state funding for industries they deem important (for whatever reason - geopolitically strategic, military, or welfare, etc). Whether it's the most "efficient" form of capital allocation is irrelevant (for them). The people do not have a say, and in fact, cannot be doing any form of criticism - they may have feedback, but only in so far as the party allows said feedback. It's implicit that the CCP is picking for the "greater good" - but who is the judge of that? CCP itself is! So by an act of tautology, they are doing it most efficiently!
      • amomchilov 3y ago
        Ah yes, the one who over-allocated so much capital into real estate that it has more unused apartments than the rest of the world combined, 5 times over With the greatest housing bubble has ever seen, and a deflationary spiral around the corner.
      • infecto 3y ago
        Governments certainly try. The US does the similar efforts through subsidy type programs, I don't think the Chinese government are able to accurately pick industry any better. They have more force to put behind their decisions, like building ultra cheap real estate, roads and general infrastructure but I am not sure they have the ability to pick a specific piece of industry any better.
  • itsoktocry 3y ago
    In what sense is using less energy good for the world? All forward progress has been accompanied by more energy usage.
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    Tax negative externalities
  • stavros 3y ago
    Why is using less energy good thing for the world? Using energy in itself is fine, you can use all the solar you want and nobody is going to complain. Nuclear is marginally less harmless, but still quite fine. Don't use coal or gas.
  • lebean 3y ago
    A person with this kind of mindset will tell less-developed nations to stop developing fossil fuel infrastructure because any more impact on the planet is unjustified.
    • wakawaka28 3y ago
      A person with that kind of mindset will tell you that you don't deserve to live because you use too many resources lol
      • amomchilov 3y ago
        Yet, they sure do love their lifestyle
        • jasonm23 3y ago
          Sigh. Better not save our habitat, because poseurs. Now that's a laudable mindset. Human idiocy driven extinction
          • wakawaka28 3y ago
            The hypocrisy is as good a reason as any to keep it real. But the real problem is people so brainwashed by green propaganda that they think no human activity is worthwhile. This AI stuff for example might appear wasteful, but it is very promising as a means to improve efficiency in many industries and improve people's quality of life, which may in fact reduce pollution. Even if it increased pollution somehow, that has to be weighed against all other outcomes. You can't just look at any old use of resources and declare that it isn't worth it and expect everyone to agree with you. Different people value different things in life, and that's ok.
          • infecto 3y ago
            I don't think that has to be the case for anyone in this chain. I am very conscious of my use of resources. I also realize that there is massive green washing of things. Lots of things marketed as the "green" way are also not that great for the planet, sometimes a sheet of cling wrap or a ziploc bag is ok to use. It also is true that often people love to project their feelings for saving the planet but are living a lifestyle that says otherwise. When it comes to energy use, I don't believe anyone should have the power to say what should be allowed or not. That will stifle innovation. For every innovation there must have been thousands if not more failures.
• bamboozled 3y ago
  Maybe anyone with a conscience, nuclear energy should be going to decarbonisation of the existing economy not to expanding a new industry en masse. People are funny on this forum, when it was Bitcoin it was the devil and now it’s helping us complete our lines of code it’s ok to require a nuclear power plant to run such a system? I guess whatever benefits the individual is ok ? Silicone valley types are funny too because it was all about developing fusion to save humanity now it’s about developing fusion to cat gifs? These products need to be taxed to price in these externalities we can’t keep this up, it’s ridiculous.
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    "These products need to be taxed to price in these externalities we can’t keep this up, it’s ridiculous." The negative externality you are worried about isn't AI, but pollution/carbon emissions. Tax pollution instead of deciding for other people what use case is worth it. Edit: To be clear, I am all for this. I'd love to see a massive(!) carbon tax.
    • bamboozled 3y ago
      Which is fine and I agree but you know that for sure, the power big tech has over US politics means this will never happen.
  • xxpor 3y ago
    >Maybe anyone with a conscience, nuclear energy should be going to decarbonisation of the existing economy not to expanding a new industry en masse The world isn't static. Electricity is fungible, it doesn't matter what it goes to.
  • SmooL 3y ago
    There's no good reason for BTC to be set up to use that much energy. There are viable, proven alternatives like proof of stake. I'd also be more forgiving if BTC only required a given amount of power, but no, the system is designed such the power requirement is related to the cost of flops/watt - it's specifically designed such that the system will use more power as power becomes cheaper.
• bigiain 3y ago
  "API requests will only get cheaper" You've somehow missed all the "enshitification" processes Cory Doctorow and others have been documenting? "Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification." OpenAI (et al.) are all deeply in the "First, they are good to their users" stage of their business plan, but they WILL. NOT. STAY. THERE. Whatever product relying on OpenAI you can offer/build/grow into a business, sooner or later you're going to be squeezed for every cent in profit, in the same way as companies who were convinced Facebook was a great alternative to running their own web presence are these days - having to pay to ensure content that people who've like and subscribed to their pages end up seeing anything they post. Your $20 subscription is not even close to covering electricity costs - never mind covering capitalisation costs for $1.6 billion data centres with another $1.6 billion dollars worth of GPUs to put in them. (Think about it. Even if that 3.2 billion dollar datacenter was funded borrowing at only 1% - you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans.)
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    "You've somehow missed all the "enshitification" processes Cory Doctorow and others have been documenting?" I read about it, but don't believe it's a new law now that affects everything with no exceptions. Even is OpenAI wants to go from explore and expand into extract mode, open-source models are getting better every day and will create a decent floor. > you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans. Maybe I live in a bubble (I definitely do), but that subscriber number seems quite reasonable and of course omits additional revenue from their APIs. Also if OpenAI wants to lose money, be my guest. I definitely enjoyed my VC-subsidized Uber rides of the past.
    • r00fus 3y ago
      It's not a property of the company. It's a property of the funding mechanism. Anything getting its funds from VC or hedge-funds will eventually succumb to this - it's the capital speaking.
• nytesky 3y ago
  Do you believe $20 captures all the cost of you AI queries over the period? It’s not subsidied by investors money to build market share?
  • ajmurmann 3y ago
    Between my flatrate usage and companies paying for additional API quota, I'd expect them to at least be in a position where they could be profitable if they slowed down new trading. When if that wasn't the case though it just shifts the obvious answer to the expectation of future profitability. There is clearly massive demand for this tech.