9 ms·
The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount.
by taylorius 2y ago
The future - megawatts of electricity being used, 24/7 as armies of LLMs email and debate each other, and try to sell each other programs at a great discount.
As for the humans, we went fishing instead.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sph 2y agoPeople cry about Bitcoin's energy usage now, imagine the amount of energy burned to create next-level spam with "AI". Flame me all you want, but this is one case where Bitcoin is much more useful than LLM. If it doesn't create value, as its naysayers claim, at least it allows exchanging value. LLMs on the other hand, burn electricity to actively destroy the Internet's value, for the profit of inept and greedy drones.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- throwaway0665 2y agoBitcoin has one application where as there are multiple applications of LLMs. There might be mountains of noxious AI spam but it's hard to claim that Bitcoin as a technology is more useful.
- freehorse 2y agoIt is not about the quantity of the applications, but about the value they bring to society. If it is about spamming and advertising we are even talking about negative value, actually.
- b112 2y agoSo far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. I've seen things that are wildly hobbled, and wildly inaccurate. I've seen endless companies running around, trying to improve on things. I've seen people looking in wonder at LLMs making mistakes 2 year olds don't. Most LLM usage seems to be in two categories. Replace people's jobs with wildly inaccurate and massively broken output, or trick people into doing things. I'd have to say Bitcoin is far more useful than LLMs. You have to add the pluses, and subtract the minuses, and in that view, LLMs are -1 billion, and bitcoin is maybe a 1 or 2.
- k8sagic 2y agoAI is not just LLMs. AlphaFold for example moved a critical goal post for everyone of us. bitcoin is only negative. It consumes terrawatts of energy for nothing.
- HermanMartinus 2y agoAnd even if it were just LLMs, I use LLMs in my workflow every single day, and I've never used a/the blockchain except for some mild speculation around 2017.
- whiplash451 2y agoThere is one clear (albeit somewhat boring) application of LLM: data extraction from structured documents. That field has made a leap forward with LLMs. Positive impact on society includes automated extraction in healthcare pipelines.
- immibis 2y agoUnstructured*
- whiplash451 2y agoNo, I really meant structured. Extracting data from structured documents is surprisingly hard when you need very high accuracy. What I mean by structured is: invoices, documents containing tables, etc. Extracting useful data from fully unstructured content is very hard IMO and potentially above the capacity of LLMs (depending on your definition of "useful" and "unstructured")
- b112 2y agoBut this is why I made my complexity statement in my other reply. Why are firms sending around invoices, tables instead of parseable data. Oh I know the argument, because "so hard to cooperate" on standards, etc. Madness.
- yazantapuz 2y agoWell, a friend of mine built its house thanks to btc last's ath. Surely someone is cashing out nvidia right now. Indirectly useful :)
- stavros 2y agoThis is what spam always did, why is it different now?
- rwmj 2y agoIt actually adds some cost to the spammer, so that could be good.
- justsomehnguy 2y agoSending spam is... very energy efficient, compared to the LLM usage.
- stavros 2y agoYep, and thus very cheap, the exact thing you don't want spam to be.
- sph 2y agoYou didn't need a GPU to generate Cialis spam.
- TeMPOraL 2y agoBitcoin is literally turning greed into money, by means of wasting exponentially increasing amounts of electricity. It doesn't just not create value - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. LLMs deliver value. Right here today, to countless people across countless jobs. Sure, some of that is marketing, but that's not LLM's fault - marketing is what it always has been, it's just people waking up from their Stockholm syndrome. You've always been screwed over by marketers, and Internet has already been destroyed by adtech. Adding AI into the mix doesn't change anything, except maybe that some of the jobs in this space will go away, which for once I say - good riddance. There are more honest forms of gainful employment. LLMs, for all their costs, don't burn energy superlinearly. More important, for LLMs, just like for fiat money, and about everything else other than crypto, burning electricity is a cost, upkeep, that is being aggressively minimized. More efficient LLMs benefit everyone involved. More efficient crypto just stops working, because inefficient waste is fundamental to cryptos' mathematical guarantees. Anyway, comparing crypto and LLMs is dumb. The only connection is that they both eat GPUs and their novelty periods were close together in time. But they're fundamentally different, and the hypes surrounding them are fundamentally different too. I'd say that "AI hype" is more like the dot-com bubble: sure, lots of grifters lost their money, but who cares. Technology was good; the bubble cleared out nonsense and grift around it.
- helboi4 2y agoDunno why you're being voted down, this is sort of true.
- richrichie 2y ago> It doesn't just not create value Value is a subjective concept. One could argue that its value is that arbitrary quantities of it cannot be created by dictat. > - to be able to allow exchanging value, it fundamentally requires ever increasing waste, as the waste is what gives its mathematical guarantees. One could argue that it takes a lot worse to maintain any currency such as USD as a currency. Full force of government law enforcement will be unleashed on you if you decide to have your own currency. There is a lot of "wastage" that goes to safeguard currency creation and storage and to prevent counterfeiting. I do not hold BTC. Nor do I trade it. But to discuss as if other currencies have no cost is not rational.
- rpigab 2y agoYes, that's quite right. That's why I created EtherGPT, an LLM Chat agent that runs decentralized in the Ether blockchain, on smart contracts only, to make sure that value is created and rewards directly the people and not big companies. By providing it just a fraction of just a bit north of 10% of the current fusion reactions occuring in our sun, and giving it a decade or two on processing time and sync, you can ask it simple questions like "what do dogs do when you're not around" and it will come up with helpful answers like "they go to work in an office" or funny ones like "you should park your car in direct sunlight so that your dog can recharge its phone using solar panels".
- mionhe 2y agoAnother AI response, or humor from an actual person?
- noman-land 2y agoI'm an Ethereum fan and I found this funny.
- k8sagic 2y agoAI solves gigantic issues and helps us with cancer, protein folding, potentially math and other studies, material science etc. Bitcoin consumes as much energy as a country and has basically done nothing besides moving money from one group of people to a random other group of people. And bitcoin is also motivated to find the cheapest energy independent of any ethical reasoning (taking energy from cheap chinese hydro and disrupting local energy networks) while AI will have energy from the richest companies in the world (ms, google, etc.) which already working on co2 neutral 24/7.
- bergen 2y agoNone of your problems in the first sentence are solved by LLMs. I do not dispute AI research and applications and their benefits, but the current LLM and GenerativeAI hype is of no value to hard scientific problems. Otherwise I agree with you.
- Zambyte 2y agoI think the coolest counterpoint to this I have seen so far is people using generative AI to design materials with desired properties. For example, discovering new super conductors[0]. [0] https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/230503-ai-discovers-novel-superconductor https://www.jhuapl.edu/news/news-releases/230503-ai-discover...
- kmacdough 2y agoThe benefit is all for naught if it undermines the fabric of society at the same time. All these benefits will only go to the few who land on top of this mess. It's continuing to widen the wealth gap as it is.
- k8sagic 2y agoThe wealth gap is widening while in parallel poorer people have better lives than ever. We house, heat and give access to knowledge to a lot more people than ever before. Cheap medical procedures through AI will help us all. The AI which will be able to analyse the x-ray picture from some 3th world country? It only needs a basic x-ray machine and some internet. The AI will be able to tell you what you have. I'm also convinced that if AGI is happening in the next 10 years, it will affect that many people that our society has to discuss capitalisms future.
- muzani 2y agoI look forward to the dream job of writing LLMs that argue with strangers on the internet as opposed to the current dream job of improving ad click rates by 0.0016% per quarter.
- bottled_poe 2y agoThis is why the internet as we know it is going to be driven into walled gardens. Closed by default.
- tmnvix 2y agoFrankly, I think walled gardens built and controlled by the communities that use them would be an improvement.
- ssl-3 2y ago[dead]
- masklinn 2y ago> As for the humans, we went fishing instead. To a farm upstate?
- lannisterstark 2y agoIn an optimistic POV of this, eh, why not? if models handle my day to day minutia so I have more time, why the hell not... (I know this is very optimistic POV and not realistic but still)
- CoastalCoder 2y agoBecause spam is incredibly selfish. You're trying to take the time and attention of as many people as possible, without regard for whether or not they'll benefit. One safeguard people have is knowing that it costs something to send in some way to contact them. I'm this case, the sender's time and attention. LLM spam aims to foil that safeguard,. intentionally.
- lannisterstark 2y agoIf an LLM will take care of other LLM emailing me, their last point comes true, no? I never have to deal with spam.
- flir 2y agoIf anyone hasn't read Accelerando, I heartily recommend it. For one thing, it seems to be coming true.
- tiew9Vii 2y agoThe irony Everyone is playing lip service to global warming, energy efficiency, reducing emissions. At the same time data centers are being filled with power hungry graphic cards and hardware to predict if showing a customer an ad will get a clock, generating spam that “engages” users aka clicks. It’s like living in a episode of black mirror.
- k8sagic 2y agoI disagree. Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make. Alone how much co2 is saved when i can do my banking online instead of having to drive to a bank is significant. The same with a ton of ohter daily things i do. Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment. And the companies running those GPUs actually have an incentive to be co2 neutral while bitcoin miners don't: They 1. already said they are doing / going co2 neutral due to 2. marketing and they will achieve it becauseh 3. they have the money to do so. When someone like Bill Gates or Suckerberg say 'lets build a nuclear power plant for AGI' than they will actually just do that.
- quassy 2y agoPoint 1, 2 and 3 all apply to miners as well and yet they never delivered on their promise.
- k8sagic 2y agoThe normal miners never said that. They just say this at conferences for simple greenwashing. The normal miner doesn't go to those bitcoin conferences, they buy asics, put them in some warehouses around the world and make money.
- croes 2y ago>Is video producing co2? yes. But you know what creates a lot more co2? Driving around for entertainment What's more likely, watching a movie online, drive to watch a movie in a cinema? You know what creates a lot less CO2? Staying at home reading a book vor playing a board game. >Datacenters save a lot more energy than they make I think you mean CO2. And I doubt that they actually save anything because datacenters are convenient so we use them more as alternatives with less convenience. Like the movie example, we watch more and even bad movies if it's just a click on Netflix than we do if we have to drive somewhere to watch. MS recently announced they fail der CO2 target but instead produce 40% more because of cloud services like AI
- squigz 2y agoAre LLMs able to make purchases?
- damidekronik 2y agoSlightly similar, in Lem's novel all war efforts moved to the moon where AI deployed by each nation continues in an endless conflict. Peace on Earth is achieved, peace in the mail box is achieved. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel) https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peace_on_Earth_(novel)