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> Imagine halving the resource costs of AI and what that could mean for the planet and the industry -- based on extreme estimates such savings could reduce the

• lodovic 2y ago
  I had the same thought - power use will not be halved, usage will double instead.
• Erethon 2y ago
  This is the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox and it's what always happens in these cases.
  • ben_w 2y ago
    It does happen, but not always. For example, food got cheaper and consumption has increased to the extent that obesity is a major problem, but this is much less than you might conclude from the degree to which productivity has increased per farmer. For image generation, the energy needed to create an image is rapidly approaching the energy cost of a human noticing that they've seen an image — once it gets cheap enough (and good enough) to have it replace game rendering engines, we can't really spend meaningfully more on it. (Probably. By that point they may be good enough to be trainers for other AI, or we might not need any better AI — impossible to know at this point). For text generation, difficult to tell because e.g. source code and legal code have a lot of text.
    • _heimdall 2y ago
      Food may be a bit of an outlier, the number of consumers won't change quickly in response and each person can only eat so much. When it comes to converting electricity into images and text, there really is no upper bound in sight. People are happy to load the internet up with as much content as they can churn out.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        You don't see an end at the level of everyone having it at 60fps (or so) in each eye?
        • _heimdall 2y ago
          I'm not quite sure what you mean, 60fps would have something to do with output displays but nothing to do with the content. There's no upper bound to how much content people would have LLMs make, whether that content is being consumed on cell phone screens or some kind of in-eye display.
          • ben_w 2y ago
            If you generate a new image 60 times per second, that's reasonably described as "60 fps", this is how the output of video game engines has been described for at least 25 years*. If everyone's doing that all day every day on each eye, that's a reasonable guess of an upper bound: you as a human cannot actually consume more even if you make it. GANs can already do that speed, but any given GAN is a specialist AI and not a general model; diffusion models are general, but they're slower (best generation speed I've seen is 4-5 frames per second on unknown hardware). LLMs aren't really suited to doing images at all, but can control other models (this is what ChatGPT does when "it makes an image" — it calls out to DALL•E). * how long I've been paying attention to that, not a detailed historical analysis
            • _heimdall 2y ago
              Sure, I supposed you could calculate a limit by looking at how many human eyes there are, how many frames per second they can see, and max resolution visible. That still isn't actually a limit on how many images could be made, only how many could be consumed. That said, if we got to such a massive scale I'd expect us to hit other limits first (electricity available, best produced, storage space, network transmission, etc.). Or did I totally misunderstand your example here? I may have misread it completely, if so sorry about that!
    • AcerbicZero 2y ago
      I think you're missing the broader analogy here; Cheap LLMs == LLMs everywhere. Cheap food == People everywhere. I'm no Malthusian, but the paradox holds here pretty well.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        The population indeed went up, and at the same time the fertility rate is declining. What Malthus was expecting is that more food would just lead to more people on the knife-edge of famine, and we're wildly far from that in most of the world. (What is paradoxical is that the USA is simultaneously very rich, has high obesity, and somehow manages to also have a huge problem with kids going hungry). The very specific point I'm claiming is that the increased consumption isn't always unbounded.
        • AcerbicZero 2y ago
          The fertility rate trends are missing the core point here. Your obesity and hunger examples actually reinforce the Jevons paradox - when a resource becomes cheap enough, we find ways to use it even beyond what seems rational. But more importantly, you're still not getting the original Malthusian comparison: Malthus wasn't predicting that cheaper food would make people eat more (obesity) - he was predicting that cheaper food would lead to more total people. Similarly, cheaper AI won't just make individual AIs consume more - it means AI will be deployed everywhere possible. The parallel is about multiplication of instances, not increased individual consumption.
        • hhdhdbdb 2y ago
          Why is fertility declining? I posit we are hitting non-food constraints. Political ones. Land use constraints. If you build millions of homes fertility will go up.
          • ben_w 2y ago
            There are millions of empty homes in this world. I'd assume environmental, but there's also more subtle answers than will fit in a comment box — whatever the cause, it has to be near-global. China's building loads more houses, still has a fertility decline.
    • skybrian 2y ago
      Image generation isn't cheap enough until we have sites that work like Google Image search, filling the page with image variations nearly instantly and available for free.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        We're not a huge distance from that already. https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14837 https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.14837 Also TIL this is generated at 20 frames per second, the best I've used myself was "only" 4-5; does anyone know the performance and power consumption of a Google TPU?
    • hhdhdbdb 2y ago
      Bitcoin is a pure exanple thay shows the limit to energy consumption is how much money people have to throw at it. And if that money is thrown into generating more energy it is a cycle. There is no stomach size and human reproduction constraints. We can waste power as quickly as we can generate more. The only hope is to generate this power greenly.
      • ben_w 2y ago
        The existence of examples where it happens by design does not say anything either way about if it must happen all the time.
        • hhdhdbdb 2y ago
          Yeah I am not saying all the time, but I am saying when it happens it can br less bounded than "human population growth in the early 21st century."
• esafak 2y ago
  It's possible to decrease costs faster than usage can rise.
• airstrike 2y ago
  You specifically picked things like toasters and fridges which seem like frivolous if not entirely useless applications of LLMs. But you can be more charitable and imagine more productive uses of AI on the edge that are impossible today. Those uses would presumably create some value, so if by reducing AI energy costs by 90% we get all the AI usage we have today plus those new uses that aren't currently viable, it's a better bang for buck.
  • ithkuil 2y ago
    AI will be useful with toasters and fridges but of course that doesn't mean it will have to run on the devices itself
  • derektank 2y ago
    I actually think that fridges with image recognition would be a value add depending on the price. Could evaluate whether or not your food has spoiled, queue up a list of items to purchase, etc.
    • spockz 2y ago
      Maybe for larger kitchen/restaurants. But for residential use I think it would only serve to further distance the human from nature with all subsequent drawbacks.
    • workflowsauce 2y ago
      Fridge snake that crawls through the fridge and maps out the food
• theptip 2y ago
  The answer depends on what is rate-limiting growth; while we are supply-constrained on GPUs you can’t just increase AI usage. The next bottleneck will be datacenter power interconnects, but in that scenario as you say you can expect power usage to expand to fill the supply gap if there is a perf win.
• layer8 2y ago
  That depends on whether AI cost is dominated by power consumption cost [0]. I don’t think it is? [0] For inference, that is. Training is another matter, and energy consumption for hardware manufacturing yet another.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• Ensorceled 2y ago
  Insulation, double glazed windows and other improvements in reducing heating and cooling costs in houses resulted in houses doubling in size. Increasing fuel economy resulted in many more cars being replaced by SUVs. AI usage will definitely increase to fill the space.