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Yes, according to Vox Microsoft is leasing all the energy from the Three Mile nuclear power plant and planning to construct more to power their AI training. Peo

Yes, according to Vox Microsoft is leasing all the energy from the Three Mile nuclear power plant and planning to construct more to power their AI training. People pointed out how much energy Bitcoin was (and still is) wasting, AI looks like it's going to dwarf that amount of energy use for an equally questionable product. e: https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-deal-ai-data-centers https://www.theverge.com/2024/9/20/24249770/microsoft-three-...

soulofmischief 2y ago
"Equally questionable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. If you haven't gotten anything out of these technologies, that's on you and not them. There's all manner of insane, ambitious things being worked on in the open right now, if you are able to muster the discernment necessary to ignore the natural, unavoidable pile of grift that follows any new technology or hype cycle.
- jjulius 2y ago
  >There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. And in your opinion, these are...?
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    Regarding crypto, IC[0] for example is an incredible experiment to make decentralized cloud compute viable, using WASM runtimes. Lots of neat crypto projects like this. People forget the whole point was decentralization and trustless systems. While the grifters settled on centralized systems and gaslighting users, real crypto projects continue to explore the possibilities of decentralization. With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways. And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work. This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction. Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it. [0] https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/
    - oefnak 2y ago
      > Talking with our data Beautifully put, thanks for writing my thoughts out.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        It's something we'll take for granted one day and wonder how anyone ever got anything done without it.
    - therouwboat 2y ago
      Image generation with stable diffusion was useless, most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense, like driving a car and driver is sitting in air outside of the car. Music generation is just mangled music from some popular band with custom lyrics, how can you think that you are creating something here?
      - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
        > most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense This is good enough for 90% of image use cases, which is mildly relevant filler between and next to text.
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        You can have that opinion. But for a creative person, any tool can be viable, and constraints often aid the creative decision-making process. Many artists are making use of these tools already across many mediums in order to create new sounds, imagery, 3d models from text, all sorts of things, and the people consuming it consciously are enjoying it. If an artist enjoys using a tool to make something, and their patron enjoys the creative output, do you or I have any right to judge or admonish their process? Visionaries see what is possible, they don't spend their time critiquing things that aren't perfect and instead recognize and engage with novel, paradigm-shifting tools. I understand not wanting to interact with low-effort VC-driven bullshit, but there's a lot of amazing work being done in the open by scientists and enthusiasts. The endgame, after these tools are developed and ironed out, will be a wealth of highly creative content like we've never experienced. We can shit on these tools or grab a shovel and try to improve them, which is what a huge community of people is doing right now despite the criticism.
- beeflet 2y ago
  In cryptocurrency, mining is not necessary for technical progress. You could have a world in which the top cryptocurrencies are 1/100th of their current speculative value and thus 1/100th of the funding would go to miners and they could still demonstrate the technology and improve the state of the art. In many ways, the amount of money being put into cryptocurrency is antithetical to its development
- a13n 2y ago
  yeah saying AI is questionable is like saying building the internet or electricity is questionable
  - grugagag 2y ago
    Massively training LLMs in hoping they would magically turn intelligent is questionable. I hope I am wrong and nothing is wasted. Only time will tell
    - qgin 2y ago
      Nobody really knows where the limit of scaling is, but we haven’t hit it yet. Models get smarter with emergent abilities as they get bigger.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      Motivated people still have to spend their time and resources finding out, instead of just complaining like many have done.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
ziml77 2y ago
People are also concerned about the amount of energy going into AI. But still, there is a major difference between AI and Bitcoin. With AI, the more power we put in the more we get out. That might be in the form of more accurate output, longer output, or larger context windows. With Bitcoin, more power going into the calculations just makes the calculations harder so the amount of useful work stays exactly the same. The calculations themselves have no use other than to waste time and power.

soulofmischief 2y ago

"Equally questionable" is doing a lot of heavy lifting there. There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. If you haven't gotten anything out of these technologies, that's on you and not them. There's all manner of insane, ambitious things being worked on in the open right now, if you are able to muster the discernment necessary to ignore the natural, unavoidable pile of grift that follows any new technology or hype cycle.

jjulius 2y ago
>There are literally massive, paradigm-changing projects in both spaces right now, with real users and communities. And in your opinion, these are...?
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  Regarding crypto, IC[0] for example is an incredible experiment to make decentralized cloud compute viable, using WASM runtimes. Lots of neat crypto projects like this. People forget the whole point was decentralization and trustless systems. While the grifters settled on centralized systems and gaslighting users, real crypto projects continue to explore the possibilities of decentralization. With AI, I don't even know where to start. Have you used the internet recently? We have multimodal transformer models which can input and output images, video and text. We can create music and images using diffusion techniques. We have world-class text generation systems, which of course still need a lot of infrastructural support, but the viability is already being proven. We have cutting-edge translation tools which blow anything previous out the water. We have code generation and introspection tools, which work well enough to majorly augment my engineering workflow. We are developing ways to "speak" with your data, turning natural language into advance query, analysis and synthesis tasks. We have neural radiance fields. Lip syncing and voice translation tech to automate localization in powerful new ways. And we have open models! Anyone can dive in, fine-tune a model and get viable results today. We can already start creating new pipelines today, so that we aren't wasting our time doing that once models get better at not hallucinating. The individuals and organizations who wait for this new technology to be perfectly reliable will get left in the dust by those who took the chance and did the pioneering work. This is still barely scratching the surface. It seems like there's at least one ground-breaking paper a month, often more than that. It's certainly easier to bash these technologies and communities from afar, but that attitude will only hinder you in the future once the tech has caught up. What we have already created through experimentation just since 2015 is stuff that I grew up reading about in science fiction. Could we hit an AI winter instead? Will decentralization ultimately be a dead end? Maybe. But it would be considerate to not bash those who are spending time and money to find out, and to not let grifters whom they cannot control co-opt the space and the narrative around it. [0] https://internetcomputer.org/ https://internetcomputer.org/
  - oefnak 2y ago
    > Talking with our data Beautifully put, thanks for writing my thoughts out.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      It's something we'll take for granted one day and wonder how anyone ever got anything done without it.
  - therouwboat 2y ago
    Image generation with stable diffusion was useless, most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense, like driving a car and driver is sitting in air outside of the car. Music generation is just mangled music from some popular band with custom lyrics, how can you think that you are creating something here?
    - JumpCrisscross 2y ago
      > most of the time it makes images that don't even make any sense This is good enough for 90% of image use cases, which is mildly relevant filler between and next to text.
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      You can have that opinion. But for a creative person, any tool can be viable, and constraints often aid the creative decision-making process. Many artists are making use of these tools already across many mediums in order to create new sounds, imagery, 3d models from text, all sorts of things, and the people consuming it consciously are enjoying it. If an artist enjoys using a tool to make something, and their patron enjoys the creative output, do you or I have any right to judge or admonish their process? Visionaries see what is possible, they don't spend their time critiquing things that aren't perfect and instead recognize and engage with novel, paradigm-shifting tools. I understand not wanting to interact with low-effort VC-driven bullshit, but there's a lot of amazing work being done in the open by scientists and enthusiasts. The endgame, after these tools are developed and ironed out, will be a wealth of highly creative content like we've never experienced. We can shit on these tools or grab a shovel and try to improve them, which is what a huge community of people is doing right now despite the criticism.
beeflet 2y ago
In cryptocurrency, mining is not necessary for technical progress. You could have a world in which the top cryptocurrencies are 1/100th of their current speculative value and thus 1/100th of the funding would go to miners and they could still demonstrate the technology and improve the state of the art. In many ways, the amount of money being put into cryptocurrency is antithetical to its development
a13n 2y ago
yeah saying AI is questionable is like saying building the internet or electricity is questionable
- grugagag 2y ago
  Massively training LLMs in hoping they would magically turn intelligent is questionable. I hope I am wrong and nothing is wasted. Only time will tell
  - qgin 2y ago
    Nobody really knows where the limit of scaling is, but we haven’t hit it yet. Models get smarter with emergent abilities as they get bigger.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    Motivated people still have to spend their time and resources finding out, instead of just complaining like many have done.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

ziml77 2y ago

People are also concerned about the amount of energy going into AI. But still, there is a major difference between AI and Bitcoin. With AI, the more power we put in the more we get out. That might be in the form of more accurate output, longer output, or larger context windows. With Bitcoin, more power going into the calculations just makes the calculations harder so the amount of useful work stays exactly the same. The calculations themselves have no use other than to waste time and power.