4 ms·

We are aware. AI at least have the potential to create some value, which can’t be said about crypto currencies that still waste enormous resources.

by Ma8ee 2y ago

bayindirh 2y ago
I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto people used to say when it was very new. It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are. I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc. Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".
- turtles3 2y ago
  To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller more power efficient models with the same performance are possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops and increasing value is found that 'AI' will cross the threshold of being worth the energy. Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    To be clear, I'm not against AI or LLM as a technology in general. What I'm against is the unethical way how these LLMs trained and how people are dismissive of the damage they're doing and saying "we're doing something amazing, we need no permission". Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji). However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them. Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.
- maccard 2y ago
  I disagree. Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was a solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database was a better solution the problem. I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
  - bayindirh 2y ago
    AI is a gigantic landscape with tons of different applications to different problems, and there are many solutions which work for a given problem. However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences about something being asked. More importantly, what that parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its accuracy about its slop. And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. That doesn't solve any problems.
    - maccard 2y ago
      You've moved the goalposts from AI to LLM's. Fair enough, we've been doing AI since the 50's, and this is the second AI boom in a decade. Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they are immensely useful. You might not personally find value out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with parameters", except I can not ever remember the parameters (they're different for different things). I can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified folder, and the entire task is done before I've even thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to, rather than munging data around. If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers, then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of screwing around to find something viable. > And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. > That doesn't solve any problems. I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't solve real problems. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-exchanges-traffic-decreased-since-chatgpt https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...
- devjab 2y ago
  I never heard of any reasonable uses for Crypto or Blockchain in general. A lot of people tried to sell us various things at the time but it was very obvious that it had no real value. AI is already implemented into businesses in various ways. Even if it’s not done so official you still have loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT and Claude because they work.
- msabalau 2y ago
  In terms of generative AI, for general use cases, Open AI reported having 11 million paid subscribers last quarter. People clearing paying for Adobe Firefly and Midjourney access. That's already a ton more people finding it useful in day to day life than Crypto ever had. It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend that no one is getting any value out of this. At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use, according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for AI.
Zr01 2y ago
Manga Library Z, a manga archiving site that distributed old and out-of-print manga for free has been forced to close down due to all major credit card companies refusing to provide payment services. If some hypothetical widespread decentralized payment system can prevent scenarios like this one from happening, then it would be worth the "enormous waste of resources". These days, you're essentially relegated to a non-person if card companies stop allowing you to use their services.
- Ma8ee 2y ago
  Cryptocurrencies use between 0.6% and 2.3% of all electricity in the US [O]. I guess those manga are very important to you. It would be order of magnitude more efficient to send couriers with cash to pay for those instead. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364

We are aware. AI at least have the potential to create some value, which can’t be said about crypto currencies that still waste enormous resources.

by Ma8ee 2y ago

We are aware. AI at least have the potential to create some value, which can’t be said about crypto currencies that still waste enormous resources.

bayindirh 2y ago

I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto people used to say when it was very new. It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are. I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image processing, ecosystem monitoring, etc. etc. Letting bots loose on the internet, letting them consume what they say and making them answer "Sauce is a food taste enhancer, and dressing is used to keep wounds clean while allowing them to heal. A standard serving of a dressing is two spoons".

turtles3 2y ago
To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller more power efficient models with the same performance are possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops and increasing value is found that 'AI' will cross the threshold of being worth the energy. Edit: although yes I do agree that the 'value' part is tricky. If internet spam can generate more 'value' for some people than doing science, then when intelligence is cheap we are in for a rough time.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  To be clear, I'm not against AI or LLM as a technology in general. What I'm against is the unethical way how these LLMs trained and how people are dismissive of the damage they're doing and saying "we're doing something amazing, we need no permission". Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji). However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them. Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.
maccard 2y ago
I disagree. Crypto people kept suggesting that crypto was a solution to an X problem while ignoring that a database was a better solution the problem. I’ve yet to hear any good use cases for crypto, and I’ve been asking for years on here. Meanwhile there are a bunch of AI tools out there that are working and helping.
- bayindirh 2y ago
  AI is a gigantic landscape with tons of different applications to different problems, and there are many solutions which work for a given problem. However, if we narrow what AI is to LLMs, we have a stochastic parrot which needs to be fed the world literally to enable it to create semi-coherent sentences about something being asked. More importantly, what that parrot says doesn't have to be true, it can't be guaranteed to be true, and can't be verified about its accuracy about its slop. And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. That doesn't solve any problems.
  - maccard 2y ago
    You've moved the goalposts from AI to LLM's. Fair enough, we've been doing AI since the 50's, and this is the second AI boom in a decade. Those "stochastic parrots" have still proven that they are immensely useful. You might not personally find value out of coding assistants, but many many people do (as an example). People are (allegedly) turning to LLM's rather than StackOverflow for help [0]. They work well for boilerplate where you're an SME and able to validate the output - I can review 10x the amount of code I can write for example. They work (remarkably) well for summarising input text. An example - I semi occasionally (3-4x per year) have to deal with a few hundred GB of audio files that need cleanup. The cleanup tasks are "run FFMPEG with parameters", except I can not ever remember the parameters (they're different for different things). I can: read https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html https://ffmpeg.org/ffmpeg.html or I can ask ChatGPT to write a script to clip the silence and add a 0.5 second intro fade to every file in a specified folder, and the entire task is done before I've even thought about it. I get to focus on what I want to, rather than munging data around. If you expand your definition from LLMs to Transformers, then you get Whisper as a stand out example of something awesome. There's definitely negatives, but things like Diffusion are being used outside of image generation for drug discovery. We're not going to yolo AI generated drugs into human testing, but we can save an awful lot of screwing around to find something viable. > And you spend gigawatts of power just to train this thing which selects and prints words based on probability and some randomness. > That doesn't solve any problems. I disagree, it does solve problems. A very fair question to ask is "is it worth the cost" and I would agree that it's not worth the cost. That doesn't mean it doesn't solve real problems. [0] https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-exchanges-traffic-decreased-since-chatgpt https://meta.stackexchange.com/questions/387278/has-stack-ex...
devjab 2y ago
I never heard of any reasonable uses for Crypto or Blockchain in general. A lot of people tried to sell us various things at the time but it was very obvious that it had no real value. AI is already implemented into businesses in various ways. Even if it’s not done so official you still have loads of employees pouring company secrets into chatGPT and Claude because they work.
msabalau 2y ago
In terms of generative AI, for general use cases, Open AI reported having 11 million paid subscribers last quarter. People clearing paying for Adobe Firefly and Midjourney access. That's already a ton more people finding it useful in day to day life than Crypto ever had. It is certainly reasonable to suspect that the scale of investments (in trillions of dollars) don't match the scale of the opportunity. But it's a bit silly to pretend that no one is getting any value out of this. At the end of the day, data centers are 2% of energy use, according to the IEA. That's trending up, but even in couple of years, data center stuff is mostly going to be typical cloud stuff, then crypto, and then a fraction for AI.

Zr01 2y ago

Manga Library Z, a manga archiving site that distributed old and out-of-print manga for free has been forced to close down due to all major credit card companies refusing to provide payment services. If some hypothetical widespread decentralized payment system can prevent scenarios like this one from happening, then it would be worth the "enormous waste of resources". These days, you're essentially relegated to a non-person if card companies stop allowing you to use their services.

Ma8ee 2y ago
Cryptocurrencies use between 0.6% and 2.3% of all electricity in the US [O]. I guess those manga are very important to you. It would be order of magnitude more efficient to send couriers with cash to pay for those instead. [0] https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364 https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364