5 ms·

ChatGPT is not housing anyone, nor is it providing office space. Even Disneyland is at least providing joy for children and adults.

exe34 2y ago
chat gpt doesn't enjoy anything for itself, it provides value to people. i don't use it much, but on occasion it's been helpful to me.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  So do coal-fired power plants. So does our endless production of plastic waste and our ever-growing landfills. So does all our fossil-fuel use. Where is it all taking us, friend? Most people are not honest enough with themself to understand the bigger picture, nor are they selfless enough to give a darn to sacrifice something of their own benefit to help the whole.
  - stavros 2y ago
    Yes, let's all kill ourselves and save resources!
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      Yeah, having less data centers will cost lives; it won't be lack of drinking water or living in an overheated environment! My mistake is mistaking high karma for intelligence. Wrong again!
      - soulofmischief 2y ago
        This anti-compute crusade you're on is very strange. Data centers are not why the planet is burning up. Maybe you should be less patronizing of others' intelligence and do a little research of your own so that your arguments will be more rooted in fact and not feelings. ~1-3% of global energy consumption is a paltry price to pay for what digital technology can offer us. Do we waste a lot of it clicking ads and watching Netflix? Yeah, a lot of people do, and I take issue with that, not... data centers.
    - erinaceousjones 2y ago
      ...You know there's some options between "capitalism optimising for profit margins leads to unchecked consumption of resources" and "everyone has to die", right?
      - stavros 2y ago
        Yes, in the way that there are differences in pollution between using coal-fired plants and using LLMs.
  - exe34 2y ago
    do you live in the forest in peace with nature?
- go_elmo 2y ago
  The question is how much value. Sure, learning about entropy & unblocking students is huge value - producing clickbait content does way less so imo
  - exe34 2y ago
    You don't have to click on clickbait. If you voted with your clicks, it wouldn't make them a profit.
go_elmo 2y ago
I agree - it has no direct use to the wellbeing of humans - Id say if the indirect use (e.g. humans saving time [which itself is probably the most energy intensive thing, food, housing, entertainment], gaining knowledge has to surpass the costs in Order for the investment to make sense.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  No one is 'gaining knowledge'. LLMs are just black-box tools that compute pseudo answers based upon a somewhat arbitrary set of training data. It's a crapshoot that looks good like ELIZA looks good.
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    Me: Please tell me an interesting fact I don't know. GPT: Did you know that octopuses have three hearts and their blood is blue? Two of their hearts pump blood to the gills, while the third pumps it to the rest of the body. Interestingly, when an octopus swims, the heart that supplies blood to the body actually stops beating, which is one reason they prefer crawling to swimming—it’s less stressful on their system! Their blue blood is due to hemocyanin, a copper-based molecule that is more efficient than hemoglobin in cold, low-oxygen environments. Me, after researching and corroborating each claim, which you should always do for any source: Wow, I didn't know some of that! Thanks for sharing! --- This was no different than googling "interesting facts about octopuses" and skimming the first few links. And if I'd done that, you wouldn't be claiming that I didn't "gain knowledge". But by all means, commence the mental gymnastics that "prove" I haven't gained knowledge. Perhaps because I had to corroborate the information? No, you should always do that for anything. But I'm eager to hear your explanation for what really happened.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      That's a lot of energy used to save you going through the octopus section of Wikipedia. If only there was a test to find out if the person using it was a moron. Then it might be useful. Of course, Dunning-Kruger dictates that no one using such a system would ask such an important question. Also, the world is obviously well short of the necessary training data. I've got yer real intelligence right here, dude. Ask away. I even know how to tell you that your question is a waste of time.
robertlagrant 2y ago
Disneyland also involves a lot of plane flights and driving to get to it. If you add all that up it's a lot more.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  Yeah, I'm personally not a huge fan, but it's not nearly as bad as what any gambling destination is. That is nearly pure waste, with the possibility that people are seriously damaging themselves with addiction and alcohol. There is a force inside us that seeks to convince us to undermine our own selves.
  - robertlagrant 2y ago
    Sure, but thinking of all data centres as gambling is just going to lead to poor conclusions, no?
thrw42A8N 2y ago
ChatGPT saved 3 hours of my time today.
- MrMcCall 2y ago
  You are far more energically efficient than a data center. Wetware >>> software
  - thrw42A8N 2y ago
    I really am not. I just drank 1 liter of water. ChatGPT consumed several orders of magnitude less doing much more than me. I also just heated up my meal, with meat and fries. ChatGPT didn't need that. All of that while walking around my apartment full of various "useless" stuff. ChatGPT doesn't care.
    - MrMcCall 2y ago
      You're not counting the training of the LLM.
      - thrw42A8N 2y ago
        I am. That's amortized over millions of users and billions of invocations. But who cares? I'd gladly pay for something to do in minutes what would've taken me hours. It doesn't need to be as efficient as my body in the same time frame.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
soulofmischief 2y ago
My entire life trajectory has changed because of how LLMs have expanded my ability to write, think and reason. Have fun at Disneyland, though.
- mossTechnician 2y ago
  If you've experienced this life altering change and it's reproducible, you could show up a lot of AI critics with specifics. How have LLMs expanded your ability to reason, for example?
  - soulofmischief 2y ago
    At the risk of sounding negative... The thing is I have tried interfacing with skeptics, and most of them are just run-of-the-mill closeminded, have their minds made up before you even begin and will just argue in circles until it simply isn't worth it. Meanwhile, a decent portion of my own peers echo my sentiment, mainly programmers. I don't have to argue with them. Instead I can analyze and improve methodologies with them, collaborate, and generally have positive, stimulating and thought-provoking conversations. You can imagine which of the two kinds of people I typically choose to engage with. Especially on a forum like HN, where meandering circular arguments are discouraged. Maybe the happy medium is just blogging about it. I really do want to blog and I'm trying to learn about it and make more time to write, but HN does already scratch a lot of that itch for me. All in all... the only self-proclaimed AI critics left at this point are people who have either chosen to be deliberately ignorant about the benefits of this technology, or who lack the depth of skill or interest to find useful things for these models to do for them. I've taken on increasingly ambitious projects because I now have little programmable assistants embedded into the UX of various tools that I work with. They're not perfect, sometimes we argue, sometimes I just have to turn them off for a few hours, roll up my sleeves and work through the muck. But at a high level, the benefits are huge. Modern adequately-trained LLMs are amazing at project scaffolding, architecture, design, documentation and generally being a backboard for my thoughts when I have no one else around to converse with. My typical day is highly varied and while I have specialist friends, none of them match the generalist abilities of some LLMs. I am generally skilled enough with informatics to know when I need to corroborate or discard information (basic research skills learned independently of LLMS) and so "what if it's wrong / how will you know?" has always been an irrelevant, false paradox parroted by people lacking those basic skills which should have been taught in school. These same people already struggle with finding accurate information with search engines or libraries, it's no wonder they struggle with something like an LLM which can be very confidently wrong. With programming, it's easier. You can keep the model focused, break down tasks into tiny pieces, solve and write tests for them one by one. It encourages you to write clean, modular, self-documenting code. With other topics like science, art and mathematics, I'm still consistently impressed by 4o and o1's capabilities, despite glaring shortcomings. I know you want very specific instances but I'm really ADHD and so I am not exaggerating when I say my conversations with LLMs are highly multidisciplinary and before a just a couple years ago, I had a hard time organizing some of these more esoteric and complex systems in my head. My typical conversations would probably be of little use to someone. I'm now working in parallel on several scientific and mathematical inquiries, as well as a few ambitious engineering projects. My time spent researching has greatly reduced, as I can get up to speed very quickly by dumping some articles into an LLM conversation and asking it detailed questions, asking it to provide thought models, etc., getting maximal value out of the information by immediately dialing into areas of interest. Essentially... I've always felt naked without a phone or computer around to google the random questions and ideas I have throughout the day, and I consider the internet and search engines integral to who I am and the knowledge and skill I've attained. Now, instead of a search engine, I feel naked if I don't have a well-trained chat model around. I have developed a similar dependence as I have to search engines (I panic when I have a question, slap my leg and realize my phone isn't on my person) but the tradeoff is that I feel my thinking and doing has been augmented. And even if transformers/LLMs hit a dead end in our lifetime... after all, many of these techniques are rooted in ideas from the 60s-90s which simply "didn't work" at the time, only to become relevant again after sufficient compute is accessible... I am eager to see what the next 40-odd years of technology brings us. Regarding reproducibility, I think it would be extremely beneficial for people to be shown how AI can help them with day-to-day things, but I have a hard time recommending LLMs to people who I know aren't equipped with enough research skill to avoid harming or hindering themselves from incorrect advice. And my experience with these models is mainly academic and related to engineering, so I just don't have much to offer normies, but I'm sure other people have made lots of ground on that. Personally I think chat models in their current form just aren't natural or functional enough to appeal to the average person. I think the average person will see the biggest benefits from tooling built around modern models. I'm working on one right now, a grid-based component system which essentially lets you create tiny little tools that can speak with each other, and orchestrate them into one or more domain-specific UIs. Users can share and adapt apps or individual components, or create production-ready in-house creative or business tooling. Social productivity programs like this, as well as calendars, sheets, etc (all buildable within my app in minutes with a handful of stock components, with built-in multi-user support) will unlock the full power of advanced natural language models. Hoping to debut it sometime next year.
fnordpiglet 2y ago
You know what’s also not housing someone? Office space. This feels like the ultimate waste - massive empty buildings in prime central locations with plentiful public transit designed to house humans during the day in addition to their own houses - which are being pushed further and further away from the central locations because of the office space - that they’re forced to commute long distances against their will to occupy simply because management wants them to. I’d rather have a data center. I’ve used ChatGPT to teach myself several programming languages, guided me through learning how to design circuits for my own projects, among many other uses. Professionally I use LLMs to scale processes for detecting fraud, financial crimes such as money laundering and sanctions evasion, amongst other things at a much greater precision and recall than other models and human investigators at a much larger scale (we still use those other vectors as well but the major break through for quality and scale was LLM hierarchical agents). We’ve done the analysis and it’s demonstrably improved our business and made the financial system in our corner safer and more stable. So, I dunno my friend. I think you’ve perhaps got a bias based on your inexperience ?
- yallpendantools 2y ago
  I think the question is how efficient is ChatGPT in providing economic value. I don't want to get in a game of anecdotes because I don't want to deny that there are use cases well-suited for LLMs and you might be in such a field. The efficiency question is thus: of all the queries LLMs serve, how many of those are hallucinations (which then need to be reprompted), how many of those are simple queries that could've been solved with more traditional search methods, and how many of those are queries which only LLMs could've solved? I don't really have an answer to my own efficiency question and will likely never will. But for every company like yours, there are companies who blindly introduce LLMs into their product for no other reason than hype. Spotify, your recommendations ("DJ") are no better because you used LLMs; collaborative filtering worked just fine for music. Meta/FB, your value prop to me as a social network hits rock bottom if my friends are not even sharing real-life experiences. Google, you're already on thin ice with all the SEO spam but your value decreases even more if you give me hallucinations for summaries. Hence, sorry but my outlook isn't rosy.
  - 2y ago
ttyprintk 2y ago
But this article wants to talk about unnecessary office cooling without talking about unnecessary offices. If this is such a big deal, then why aren’t office parks springing up in the arctic?

exe34 2y ago

chat gpt doesn't enjoy anything for itself, it provides value to people. i don't use it much, but on occasion it's been helpful to me.

MrMcCall 2y ago
So do coal-fired power plants. So does our endless production of plastic waste and our ever-growing landfills. So does all our fossil-fuel use. Where is it all taking us, friend? Most people are not honest enough with themself to understand the bigger picture, nor are they selfless enough to give a darn to sacrifice something of their own benefit to help the whole.
- stavros 2y ago
  Yes, let's all kill ourselves and save resources!
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    Yeah, having less data centers will cost lives; it won't be lack of drinking water or living in an overheated environment! My mistake is mistaking high karma for intelligence. Wrong again!
    - soulofmischief 2y ago
      This anti-compute crusade you're on is very strange. Data centers are not why the planet is burning up. Maybe you should be less patronizing of others' intelligence and do a little research of your own so that your arguments will be more rooted in fact and not feelings. ~1-3% of global energy consumption is a paltry price to pay for what digital technology can offer us. Do we waste a lot of it clicking ads and watching Netflix? Yeah, a lot of people do, and I take issue with that, not... data centers.
  - erinaceousjones 2y ago
    ...You know there's some options between "capitalism optimising for profit margins leads to unchecked consumption of resources" and "everyone has to die", right?
    - stavros 2y ago
      Yes, in the way that there are differences in pollution between using coal-fired plants and using LLMs.
- exe34 2y ago
  do you live in the forest in peace with nature?
go_elmo 2y ago
The question is how much value. Sure, learning about entropy & unblocking students is huge value - producing clickbait content does way less so imo
- exe34 2y ago
  You don't have to click on clickbait. If you voted with your clicks, it wouldn't make them a profit.

go_elmo 2y ago

I agree - it has no direct use to the wellbeing of humans - Id say if the indirect use (e.g. humans saving time [which itself is probably the most energy intensive thing, food, housing, entertainment], gaining knowledge has to surpass the costs in Order for the investment to make sense.

MrMcCall 2y ago
No one is 'gaining knowledge'. LLMs are just black-box tools that compute pseudo answers based upon a somewhat arbitrary set of training data. It's a crapshoot that looks good like ELIZA looks good.
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  Me: Please tell me an interesting fact I don't know. GPT: Did you know that octopuses have three hearts and their blood is blue? Two of their hearts pump blood to the gills, while the third pumps it to the rest of the body. Interestingly, when an octopus swims, the heart that supplies blood to the body actually stops beating, which is one reason they prefer crawling to swimming—it’s less stressful on their system! Their blue blood is due to hemocyanin, a copper-based molecule that is more efficient than hemoglobin in cold, low-oxygen environments. Me, after researching and corroborating each claim, which you should always do for any source: Wow, I didn't know some of that! Thanks for sharing! --- This was no different than googling "interesting facts about octopuses" and skimming the first few links. And if I'd done that, you wouldn't be claiming that I didn't "gain knowledge". But by all means, commence the mental gymnastics that "prove" I haven't gained knowledge. Perhaps because I had to corroborate the information? No, you should always do that for anything. But I'm eager to hear your explanation for what really happened.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    That's a lot of energy used to save you going through the octopus section of Wikipedia. If only there was a test to find out if the person using it was a moron. Then it might be useful. Of course, Dunning-Kruger dictates that no one using such a system would ask such an important question. Also, the world is obviously well short of the necessary training data. I've got yer real intelligence right here, dude. Ask away. I even know how to tell you that your question is a waste of time.

robertlagrant 2y ago

Disneyland also involves a lot of plane flights and driving to get to it. If you add all that up it's a lot more.

MrMcCall 2y ago
Yeah, I'm personally not a huge fan, but it's not nearly as bad as what any gambling destination is. That is nearly pure waste, with the possibility that people are seriously damaging themselves with addiction and alcohol. There is a force inside us that seeks to convince us to undermine our own selves.
- robertlagrant 2y ago
  Sure, but thinking of all data centres as gambling is just going to lead to poor conclusions, no?

thrw42A8N 2y ago

ChatGPT saved 3 hours of my time today.

MrMcCall 2y ago
You are far more energically efficient than a data center. Wetware >>> software
- thrw42A8N 2y ago
  I really am not. I just drank 1 liter of water. ChatGPT consumed several orders of magnitude less doing much more than me. I also just heated up my meal, with meat and fries. ChatGPT didn't need that. All of that while walking around my apartment full of various "useless" stuff. ChatGPT doesn't care.
  - MrMcCall 2y ago
    You're not counting the training of the LLM.
    - thrw42A8N 2y ago
      I am. That's amortized over millions of users and billions of invocations. But who cares? I'd gladly pay for something to do in minutes what would've taken me hours. It doesn't need to be as efficient as my body in the same time frame.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]

soulofmischief 2y ago

My entire life trajectory has changed because of how LLMs have expanded my ability to write, think and reason. Have fun at Disneyland, though.

mossTechnician 2y ago
If you've experienced this life altering change and it's reproducible, you could show up a lot of AI critics with specifics. How have LLMs expanded your ability to reason, for example?
- soulofmischief 2y ago
  At the risk of sounding negative... The thing is I have tried interfacing with skeptics, and most of them are just run-of-the-mill closeminded, have their minds made up before you even begin and will just argue in circles until it simply isn't worth it. Meanwhile, a decent portion of my own peers echo my sentiment, mainly programmers. I don't have to argue with them. Instead I can analyze and improve methodologies with them, collaborate, and generally have positive, stimulating and thought-provoking conversations. You can imagine which of the two kinds of people I typically choose to engage with. Especially on a forum like HN, where meandering circular arguments are discouraged. Maybe the happy medium is just blogging about it. I really do want to blog and I'm trying to learn about it and make more time to write, but HN does already scratch a lot of that itch for me. All in all... the only self-proclaimed AI critics left at this point are people who have either chosen to be deliberately ignorant about the benefits of this technology, or who lack the depth of skill or interest to find useful things for these models to do for them. I've taken on increasingly ambitious projects because I now have little programmable assistants embedded into the UX of various tools that I work with. They're not perfect, sometimes we argue, sometimes I just have to turn them off for a few hours, roll up my sleeves and work through the muck. But at a high level, the benefits are huge. Modern adequately-trained LLMs are amazing at project scaffolding, architecture, design, documentation and generally being a backboard for my thoughts when I have no one else around to converse with. My typical day is highly varied and while I have specialist friends, none of them match the generalist abilities of some LLMs. I am generally skilled enough with informatics to know when I need to corroborate or discard information (basic research skills learned independently of LLMS) and so "what if it's wrong / how will you know?" has always been an irrelevant, false paradox parroted by people lacking those basic skills which should have been taught in school. These same people already struggle with finding accurate information with search engines or libraries, it's no wonder they struggle with something like an LLM which can be very confidently wrong. With programming, it's easier. You can keep the model focused, break down tasks into tiny pieces, solve and write tests for them one by one. It encourages you to write clean, modular, self-documenting code. With other topics like science, art and mathematics, I'm still consistently impressed by 4o and o1's capabilities, despite glaring shortcomings. I know you want very specific instances but I'm really ADHD and so I am not exaggerating when I say my conversations with LLMs are highly multidisciplinary and before a just a couple years ago, I had a hard time organizing some of these more esoteric and complex systems in my head. My typical conversations would probably be of little use to someone. I'm now working in parallel on several scientific and mathematical inquiries, as well as a few ambitious engineering projects. My time spent researching has greatly reduced, as I can get up to speed very quickly by dumping some articles into an LLM conversation and asking it detailed questions, asking it to provide thought models, etc., getting maximal value out of the information by immediately dialing into areas of interest. Essentially... I've always felt naked without a phone or computer around to google the random questions and ideas I have throughout the day, and I consider the internet and search engines integral to who I am and the knowledge and skill I've attained. Now, instead of a search engine, I feel naked if I don't have a well-trained chat model around. I have developed a similar dependence as I have to search engines (I panic when I have a question, slap my leg and realize my phone isn't on my person) but the tradeoff is that I feel my thinking and doing has been augmented. And even if transformers/LLMs hit a dead end in our lifetime... after all, many of these techniques are rooted in ideas from the 60s-90s which simply "didn't work" at the time, only to become relevant again after sufficient compute is accessible... I am eager to see what the next 40-odd years of technology brings us. Regarding reproducibility, I think it would be extremely beneficial for people to be shown how AI can help them with day-to-day things, but I have a hard time recommending LLMs to people who I know aren't equipped with enough research skill to avoid harming or hindering themselves from incorrect advice. And my experience with these models is mainly academic and related to engineering, so I just don't have much to offer normies, but I'm sure other people have made lots of ground on that. Personally I think chat models in their current form just aren't natural or functional enough to appeal to the average person. I think the average person will see the biggest benefits from tooling built around modern models. I'm working on one right now, a grid-based component system which essentially lets you create tiny little tools that can speak with each other, and orchestrate them into one or more domain-specific UIs. Users can share and adapt apps or individual components, or create production-ready in-house creative or business tooling. Social productivity programs like this, as well as calendars, sheets, etc (all buildable within my app in minutes with a handful of stock components, with built-in multi-user support) will unlock the full power of advanced natural language models. Hoping to debut it sometime next year.

fnordpiglet 2y ago

You know what’s also not housing someone? Office space. This feels like the ultimate waste - massive empty buildings in prime central locations with plentiful public transit designed to house humans during the day in addition to their own houses - which are being pushed further and further away from the central locations because of the office space - that they’re forced to commute long distances against their will to occupy simply because management wants them to. I’d rather have a data center. I’ve used ChatGPT to teach myself several programming languages, guided me through learning how to design circuits for my own projects, among many other uses. Professionally I use LLMs to scale processes for detecting fraud, financial crimes such as money laundering and sanctions evasion, amongst other things at a much greater precision and recall than other models and human investigators at a much larger scale (we still use those other vectors as well but the major break through for quality and scale was LLM hierarchical agents). We’ve done the analysis and it’s demonstrably improved our business and made the financial system in our corner safer and more stable. So, I dunno my friend. I think you’ve perhaps got a bias based on your inexperience ?

yallpendantools 2y ago
I think the question is how efficient is ChatGPT in providing economic value. I don't want to get in a game of anecdotes because I don't want to deny that there are use cases well-suited for LLMs and you might be in such a field. The efficiency question is thus: of all the queries LLMs serve, how many of those are hallucinations (which then need to be reprompted), how many of those are simple queries that could've been solved with more traditional search methods, and how many of those are queries which only LLMs could've solved? I don't really have an answer to my own efficiency question and will likely never will. But for every company like yours, there are companies who blindly introduce LLMs into their product for no other reason than hype. Spotify, your recommendations ("DJ") are no better because you used LLMs; collaborative filtering worked just fine for music. Meta/FB, your value prop to me as a social network hits rock bottom if my friends are not even sharing real-life experiences. Google, you're already on thin ice with all the SEO spam but your value decreases even more if you give me hallucinations for summaries. Hence, sorry but my outlook isn't rosy.
- 2y ago

ttyprintk 2y ago

But this article wants to talk about unnecessary office cooling without talking about unnecessary offices. If this is such a big deal, then why aren’t office parks springing up in the arctic?