5 ms·

People 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 ca

• deleted 2y ago
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• throwaway0665 2y ago
  Bitcoin 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 ago
    It 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 ago
    So 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 ago
      AI 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 ago
        And 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 ago
      There 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 ago
        Unstructured*
        • whiplash451 2y ago
          No, 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 ago
            But 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.
            • projektfu 2y ago
              Partly because the standards, such as X12, have a high startup cost to use them, they aren't very opinionated about the actual content, and you have to get the counterparty on board to use them.
      • b112 2y ago
        Healthcare pipelines! All well and good until hallucinations cause death or what not! And why is this better than employing a human. Or reducing complexity. It's not as if human wages are what causes hyper expensive US healthcare costs. This seems like a negative.
    • brabel 2y ago
      > So far, I haven't seen a useful application of LLMs. So far. What?! Whole industries have been changed already due to products based on them. I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding, and if you aren't, sorry but you're just missing out, it's not perfect but it doesn't need to be. It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is. My wife is a researcher and has to read LOTS of papers. Letting AI summarize it has made her enormously more efficient at filtering out what she needs to go into more detail. Generating relevant images for blog posts is now so easy to do (you may not like it, but as an author who used to use irrelevant photos before instead, I love it when you use it tastefully). Seriously, I can't even believe someone in 2024 can say there has not been useful applications of LLMs (almost all AI now is based on LLMs as far as I know) with a straight face.
      • pseudalopex 2y ago
        > I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding You are in a bubble. > It just needs to be better than StackOverflow and googling around for the docs or how to do things and ending up in dubious sites, and it absolutely is. Subjectively. Not absolutely.
      • commodoreboxer 2y ago
        > I don't think there's a single developer who is not using AI to get help while coding It's banned at my company due to copyright concerns. Company policy at the moment considers it a copyright landmine. It does need to be "perfect" at not being a legal liability at the very least. And the blog post image thing is not a great point. AI images for blog posts, on the whole, are still quite terrible and immediately recognizable as AI generated slop. I usually click out of articles immediately when I see an AI image at the top, because I expect the rest of the article to be in line: low value, high fluff. There are useful LLM applications, but for things that play to its strengths. It's effectively a search engine. Using it for search and summarization is useful. Using it to generate code based on code it has read would be useful if it weren't for the copyright liability, and I would argue that if you have that much boilerplate, the answer is better abstractions, libraries, and frameworks, rather than just generating that code stochastically. Imagine if the answer to assembly language being verbose was to just generate all of it rather than creating compiled programming languages.
    • Tainnor 2y ago
      I'm as skeptical about LLMs as anyone, especially when people use them for actual precision tasks (like coding), but what they actually IMHO are good at are language tasks. That is, summarising content, text generation for sufficiently formulaic tasks, even translation to an extent, and similar things.
  • yazantapuz 2y ago
    Well, 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 ago
  This is what spam always did, why is it different now?
  • rwmj 2y ago
    It actually adds some cost to the spammer, so that could be good.
  • justsomehnguy 2y ago
    Sending spam is... very energy efficient, compared to the LLM usage.
    • stavros 2y ago
      Yep, and thus very cheap, the exact thing you don't want spam to be.
  • sph 2y ago
    You didn't need a GPU to generate Cialis spam.
• TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Bitcoin 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 ago
    Dunno 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 ago
  Yes, 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 ago
    Another AI response, or humor from an actual person?
    • waciki 2y ago
      are LLMs even capable of humor? The attempts I've seen are not very funny
      • meiraleal 2y ago
        Something must be very wrong with someone who continuously laughs at computer jokes so I don't think it will ever reach the level you are expecting (hopefully).
  • noman-land 2y ago
    I'm an Ethereum fan and I found this funny.
• k8sagic 2y ago
  AI 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 ago
    None 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 ago
      I 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 ago
    The 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 ago
      The 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.