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I really hope something more transparent, understandable and debuggable. Also preferably something that wouldn't trigger the third contest about who can waste

by xg15 2y ago

I really hope something more transparent, understandable and debuggable. Also preferably something that wouldn't trigger the third contest about who can waste the most energy (after first crypto's proof-of-work insanity and then trillion-parameter models that needed a datacenter full of H100 GPUs just for training) while the climate change trajectory is already becoming more and more dire and we all really ought to reduce energy usage as much as possible.

wkat4242 2y ago
Well at least LLMs are incredibly useful, as opposed to the crypto farms that waste resources just to create scarcity. I don't think it's nearly as much of a waste. Also, those couple months in that data center can create a model that millions of people can benefit from. The inference is already setting an optimisation phase where soon it can be done on dedicated mobile hardware at low energy. Bitcoin went through this too but the problem is that there is only led to more wasted resources because wasting resources is the whole point. AI will not have this issue. It will stabilise and energy use will drop due to optimisation. It's funny though, our company is pushing all this "Green IT" nonsense internally, telling us to turn off a 10kB email banner but at the same time investing really big into everything AI because they're terrified to miss the boat. And to deal with this hypocrisy they're making ever more ridiculous greenwashing claims "One email banner wastes as much energy as 10 washing machines!". Literally, that's what they told us. In a 200MB video on our intranet. While everyone is doomscrolling TikTok and watching music videos on YouTube because they blocked Spotify on the company network. What we have to do is be smarter with our energy but I think AI can help there too. Not flying hand the world around for every meeting too.

by xg15 2y ago

wkat4242 2y ago

Well at least LLMs are incredibly useful, as opposed to the crypto farms that waste resources just to create scarcity. I don't think it's nearly as much of a waste. Also, those couple months in that data center can create a model that millions of people can benefit from. The inference is already setting an optimisation phase where soon it can be done on dedicated mobile hardware at low energy. Bitcoin went through this too but the problem is that there is only led to more wasted resources because wasting resources is the whole point. AI will not have this issue. It will stabilise and energy use will drop due to optimisation. It's funny though, our company is pushing all this "Green IT" nonsense internally, telling us to turn off a 10kB email banner but at the same time investing really big into everything AI because they're terrified to miss the boat. And to deal with this hypocrisy they're making ever more ridiculous greenwashing claims "One email banner wastes as much energy as 10 washing machines!". Literally, that's what they told us. In a 200MB video on our intranet. While everyone is doomscrolling TikTok and watching music videos on YouTube because they blocked Spotify on the company network. What we have to do is be smarter with our energy but I think AI can help there too. Not flying hand the world around for every meeting too.