5 ms·

Controlling AI's Growing Energy Needs

37 points by pseudolus 2y ago

deadbabe 2y ago
Why are we still stuck with computing technology that requires nuclear power plants worth of energy to power AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories?
- xena 2y ago
  Because the AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories doesn't sleep, eat, get sick, go on maternity/paternity leave, go on strike, want to be paid, want their pay to increase with the cost of living, or have pesky human rights that limit the value you can extract from them.
  - winocm 2y ago
    This is increasingly reminding me of those dystopian science fiction films.
    - scott_w 2y ago
      Would you say the same of any automated or mechanised process that massively reduces necessary human input for the above reasons?
      - winocm 2y ago
        That is honestly how I actually see these things being used now, they can be powerful tools if used effectively. The thought of people being replaced wholesale though…
        scott_w 2y ago
        Tractors and combine harvesters replaced humans wholesale. Would you rather we go back to a world where all farming must be done by humans manually operating equipment? Countless advancements in manufacturing replaced humans wholesale in factories. Should we undo that?
  - deadbabe 2y ago
    I don’t think you understand. Can we create a computer the size of a bee’s brain and with the same intelligence and energy requirements? If we can’t, then I don’t think we’ll ever truly achieve an efficient general intelligence.
- m3kw9 2y ago
  One is miniaturization and the other one is some sort of science breakthroughs to understand how the brain works.
- Teever 2y ago
  You're not calculating the energy required for a human being to do computation. It requires food, clothing, recreation, temperature control, healthcare, and education and all sorts of things that require oodles more energy than a simply calculation of daily calorie consumption of a human being.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    True, but the alternative is letting people starve. I suggest that this should not be one of the goals of our society.
- monkaiju 2y ago
  If it helps the AI doesnt 'match' humans at all, it does a completely different thing.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  The computing machines that the Manhattan project used were famously as fast as the average secretary doing the same calculations. Yet the computer age still happened. Ask yourself why.
- teitoklien 2y ago
  Didn’t know there was a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories answering hundreds of millions of cognitive API requests across the world each minute and continuing to grow. Tbh AI is already at the stage that its more effective and insightful on most subjects than a huge chunk of humans and their coffee and calorie sippin brains. I don’t think this sort of sadist hot take on nascent revolutionary tech that’s becoming better exponentially each year, is productive or fits into HN.
  - WA 2y ago
    Let’s see about the exponential part. Too early to judge. Some signs that the current capabilities are actually stagnating and progress is slowing down. The problem of determining when an LLM is wrong is fundamental and might be a show-stopper for exponential imorovements.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
Controlling [unjustified futurist hype's] Growing Energy Needs Haven't seen a case study yet where a company outside of spammers and scammers increased their productivity using LLMs to do any kind of classification or unstructured-data-to-structured-data translation. I've tried having it build up a table of contact information from email signatures, llama3 hallucinates phone numbers when the one I wanted was in the prompt, would have been better off with regex. Looking up film developer recipes with Perplexity Pro/GPT4o, the answer comes back with a confident 1:119 ratio of HC110 for my P33 film, when I click through the source it pulled those numbers from a completely different film stock, since naturally the forum thread drifted from discussing one brand to another midway through conversation and doesn't matter how big your context window is, LLMs cant keep associations straight. I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators because the appearance of omniscience is so seductive, but I'm more cynical by the day, the investments and nuke fast tracking seems to be coming straight out of faith that AGI is just around the corner. (Yea yea I know, I'm holding it wrong)
- add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
  > I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators Is it really worth your time? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. If you've already mastered your craft past a certain point and care about the quality of your work, this will only drag you down.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  I just wrote a multilinear algebra research paper using natural language to generate all the latex. This used to take me several hour of tedious mind numbing boiler plate. I finished in in 10 minutes today. People who aren't on board with llms as the biggest driver of growth since internet search were the type of people who still thought the yellow pages were safe from Google in 2004.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
  - bertylicious 2y ago
shrubble 2y ago
It seems more than ridiculous that this is considered a serious issue. Datacenter space, generators (to cover the power needs of the datacenter) and power cost real money and thus there is plenty of incentive to reduce it. Already we are seeing both hardware alternatives and software optimizations; human ingenuity will eventually take care of it.
- croes 2y ago
  Eventually. And if not we accelerate climate change because we built fast solutions for the energy problems instead of sustainable ones.
  - XorNot 2y ago
    The solution to climate change is not reducing energy usage. That can, at best, delay it. The solution is to generate energy without emitting CO2. We already have the technology to do this. The conflation of supposed moral virtues versus actual, practical solutions is a huge problem with messaging in this space: there are a lot of people who don't see climate change as a problem to be solved, but as the stepping stone to bringing down capitalism or some other goal they want to use it as a bandwagon for.
    - Yoric 2y ago
      Delay is good. Delay is necessary. While we have (some bricks of) the technology to generate/store/consume energy without emitting CO2, we haven't nearly rolled it out and we need time to do so. So, yes, by all means, any month we win by decreasing energy usage might save countless lives. > The conflation of supposed moral virtues versus actual, practical solutions is a huge problem with messaging in this space: there are a lot of people who don't see climate change as a problem to be solved, but as the stepping stone to bringing down capitalism or some other goal they want to use it as a bandwagon for. Fair point.
    - croes 2y ago
      >The solution is to generate energy without emitting CO2. These take time and emit CO2 themselves at least in the bulding phase. And LLMs like GPT won't help us fighting climate change so we raise our energy consumption without later benefit on that matter. Maybe we first should buld the energy sources and then use them for convenience tools. Or do you want to explain our children we fucked up because we "needed" AI to write emails that are read by AI to generate a response? Much of AIs use is still just for unnecessary things just more convenient. It's still unclear if they have a productivity benefit or just changed the way we spend the same amount of time. Intel's study found no such benefit and suggests teaching the people how to use LLMs means how to tell the machine what it should do. Sounds like programming with extra steps and more ambiguity.
doctorpangloss 2y ago
The reason people talk about this is because carbon credit trades are similar to minting shitcoins: - You have to create demand for something totally subjective like, "Does this reduce carbon emissions?" - There is a large liquid market for carbon credits. - You have to turn something nonfungible like various carbon sequestration technologies and schemes into something fungible like tons of CO2 emissions. - So you go and "mint" a "shitcoin," lets say literal chicken shit being processed "in a way" that makes it "make less carbon." Then some BS little certifying agency says that it does do that, whatever that means, and someone does some lab test once, that shows something, and then "AI Algorithms" are used to extrapolate the impact. Then you go to JP Morgan who needs various shitcoin-like things like this minted by people like you, and JP Morgan bundles it all up in a trade where Microsoft, who decided that they need to offset all datacenter emissions, will become the literal bagholder of chicken shit. Is there much of a difference between science trade journals speculating about so and so carbon reduction scheme and crypto trade journals speculating about so and so utility token? They are similar energies. I would love for there to be utility in the other side of the carbon credit schemes, but it looks like bullshit more often than not.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  You make it sound like banks tolerate fraud. A financial cleanup is coming to the carbon markets, because that’s the only way serious money will flow.
benchmarkist 2y ago
No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed to go nowhere. - Jacques Ellul
avip 2y ago
So ChatGPT-3 took ~1.3 GWh to train. And it provides some questionable value to people. While you're at it, Bitcoin, a by definition no-value product, takes ~100 TWh to run annually. Excuse the whataboutism.
vfclists 2y ago
Shouldn't the title of the article be "Research on low power alternatives to LLMs" rather than "Controlling AI's ..."
naveen99 2y ago
Controlling ? Aren’t we try to increase fraction of global energy usage towards computing transformers as fast as possible ? Desert solar anyone ?

37 points by pseudolus 2y ago

Why are we still stuck with computing technology that requires nuclear power plants worth of energy to power AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories?

xena 2y ago
Because the AI that can barely match the cognitive power of a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories doesn't sleep, eat, get sick, go on maternity/paternity leave, go on strike, want to be paid, want their pay to increase with the cost of living, or have pesky human rights that limit the value you can extract from them.
- winocm 2y ago
  This is increasingly reminding me of those dystopian science fiction films.
  - scott_w 2y ago
    Would you say the same of any automated or mechanised process that massively reduces necessary human input for the above reasons?
    - winocm 2y ago
      That is honestly how I actually see these things being used now, they can be powerful tools if used effectively. The thought of people being replaced wholesale though…
      - scott_w 2y ago
        Tractors and combine harvesters replaced humans wholesale. Would you rather we go back to a world where all farming must be done by humans manually operating equipment? Countless advancements in manufacturing replaced humans wholesale in factories. Should we undo that?
- deadbabe 2y ago
  I don’t think you understand. Can we create a computer the size of a bee’s brain and with the same intelligence and energy requirements? If we can’t, then I don’t think we’ll ever truly achieve an efficient general intelligence.
m3kw9 2y ago
One is miniaturization and the other one is some sort of science breakthroughs to understand how the brain works.
Teever 2y ago
You're not calculating the energy required for a human being to do computation. It requires food, clothing, recreation, temperature control, healthcare, and education and all sorts of things that require oodles more energy than a simply calculation of daily calorie consumption of a human being.
- Yoric 2y ago
  True, but the alternative is letting people starve. I suggest that this should not be one of the goals of our society.
monkaiju 2y ago
If it helps the AI doesnt 'match' humans at all, it does a completely different thing.
llm_trw 2y ago
The computing machines that the Manhattan project used were famously as fast as the average secretary doing the same calculations. Yet the computer age still happened. Ask yourself why.
teitoklien 2y ago
Didn’t know there was a human brain running on a cup of coffee and some calories answering hundreds of millions of cognitive API requests across the world each minute and continuing to grow. Tbh AI is already at the stage that its more effective and insightful on most subjects than a huge chunk of humans and their coffee and calorie sippin brains. I don’t think this sort of sadist hot take on nascent revolutionary tech that’s becoming better exponentially each year, is productive or fits into HN.
- WA 2y ago
  Let’s see about the exponential part. Too early to judge. Some signs that the current capabilities are actually stagnating and progress is slowing down. The problem of determining when an LLM is wrong is fundamental and might be a show-stopper for exponential imorovements.

jazzyjackson 2y ago

Controlling [unjustified futurist hype's] Growing Energy Needs Haven't seen a case study yet where a company outside of spammers and scammers increased their productivity using LLMs to do any kind of classification or unstructured-data-to-structured-data translation. I've tried having it build up a table of contact information from email signatures, llama3 hallucinates phone numbers when the one I wanted was in the prompt, would have been better off with regex. Looking up film developer recipes with Perplexity Pro/GPT4o, the answer comes back with a confident 1:119 ratio of HC110 for my P33 film, when I click through the source it pulled those numbers from a completely different film stock, since naturally the forum thread drifted from discussing one brand to another midway through conversation and doesn't matter how big your context window is, LLMs cant keep associations straight. I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators because the appearance of omniscience is so seductive, but I'm more cynical by the day, the investments and nuke fast tracking seems to be coming straight out of faith that AGI is just around the corner. (Yea yea I know, I'm holding it wrong)

add-sub-mul-div 2y ago
> I'm going to keep trying to find uses for these garbage generators Is it really worth your time? Sometimes the simplest explanation is the right one. If you've already mastered your craft past a certain point and care about the quality of your work, this will only drag you down.
llm_trw 2y ago
I just wrote a multilinear algebra research paper using natural language to generate all the latex. This used to take me several hour of tedious mind numbing boiler plate. I finished in in 10 minutes today. People who aren't on board with llms as the biggest driver of growth since internet search were the type of people who still thought the yellow pages were safe from Google in 2004.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- bertylicious 2y ago

shrubble 2y ago

It seems more than ridiculous that this is considered a serious issue. Datacenter space, generators (to cover the power needs of the datacenter) and power cost real money and thus there is plenty of incentive to reduce it. Already we are seeing both hardware alternatives and software optimizations; human ingenuity will eventually take care of it.

croes 2y ago
Eventually. And if not we accelerate climate change because we built fast solutions for the energy problems instead of sustainable ones.
- XorNot 2y ago
  The solution to climate change is not reducing energy usage. That can, at best, delay it. The solution is to generate energy without emitting CO2. We already have the technology to do this. The conflation of supposed moral virtues versus actual, practical solutions is a huge problem with messaging in this space: there are a lot of people who don't see climate change as a problem to be solved, but as the stepping stone to bringing down capitalism or some other goal they want to use it as a bandwagon for.
  - Yoric 2y ago
    Delay is good. Delay is necessary. While we have (some bricks of) the technology to generate/store/consume energy without emitting CO2, we haven't nearly rolled it out and we need time to do so. So, yes, by all means, any month we win by decreasing energy usage might save countless lives. > The conflation of supposed moral virtues versus actual, practical solutions is a huge problem with messaging in this space: there are a lot of people who don't see climate change as a problem to be solved, but as the stepping stone to bringing down capitalism or some other goal they want to use it as a bandwagon for. Fair point.
  - croes 2y ago
    >The solution is to generate energy without emitting CO2. These take time and emit CO2 themselves at least in the bulding phase. And LLMs like GPT won't help us fighting climate change so we raise our energy consumption without later benefit on that matter. Maybe we first should buld the energy sources and then use them for convenience tools. Or do you want to explain our children we fucked up because we "needed" AI to write emails that are read by AI to generate a response? Much of AIs use is still just for unnecessary things just more convenient. It's still unclear if they have a productivity benefit or just changed the way we spend the same amount of time. Intel's study found no such benefit and suggests teaching the people how to use LLMs means how to tell the machine what it should do. Sounds like programming with extra steps and more ambiguity.

doctorpangloss 2y ago

The reason people talk about this is because carbon credit trades are similar to minting shitcoins: - You have to create demand for something totally subjective like, "Does this reduce carbon emissions?" - There is a large liquid market for carbon credits. - You have to turn something nonfungible like various carbon sequestration technologies and schemes into something fungible like tons of CO2 emissions. - So you go and "mint" a "shitcoin," lets say literal chicken shit being processed "in a way" that makes it "make less carbon." Then some BS little certifying agency says that it does do that, whatever that means, and someone does some lab test once, that shows something, and then "AI Algorithms" are used to extrapolate the impact. Then you go to JP Morgan who needs various shitcoin-like things like this minted by people like you, and JP Morgan bundles it all up in a trade where Microsoft, who decided that they need to offset all datacenter emissions, will become the literal bagholder of chicken shit. Is there much of a difference between science trade journals speculating about so and so carbon reduction scheme and crypto trade journals speculating about so and so utility token? They are similar energies. I would love for there to be utility in the other side of the carbon credit schemes, but it looks like bullshit more often than not.

deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
dr_dshiv 2y ago
You make it sound like banks tolerate fraud. A financial cleanup is coming to the carbon markets, because that’s the only way serious money will flow.

benchmarkist 2y ago

No one knows where we are going, the aim of life has been forgotten, the end has been left behind. Man has set out at tremendous speed to go nowhere. - Jacques Ellul

avip 2y ago

So ChatGPT-3 took ~1.3 GWh to train. And it provides some questionable value to people. While you're at it, Bitcoin, a by definition no-value product, takes ~100 TWh to run annually. Excuse the whataboutism.

vfclists 2y ago

Shouldn't the title of the article be "Research on low power alternatives to LLMs" rather than "Controlling AI's ..."

naveen99 2y ago

Controlling ? Aren’t we try to increase fraction of global energy usage towards computing transformers as fast as possible ? Desert solar anyone ?