10 ms·
Can I ethically use LLMs?
- Filligree 2y agoThe power calculation is way off. Sure, a local model may use a maximum of 65 watts during inference. However, an H100 runs on 350 watts. Even accounting for the fact that a larger model will need more than one slice, it’s so much faster that this almost balances out. That’s not the largest difference, though. The H100 can run multiple user queries in parallel, and because LLM inference is limited by memory bandwidth, using large batch sizes this way will dramatically improve efficiency. In short, it takes less power to run it in the datacenter.
- rcthompson 2y agoI think they're also confusing power and energy, or at least not clearly distinguishing between them, with phrases like "enough to power X houses".
- NathanKP 2y agoTo put it in perspective I've previously calculated that eating a single beef burger is worse for the environment in terms of CO2 produced than using a high token I/O "reasoning" AI model all day long. The "AI uses a lot of electricity and creates a lot of carbon" crowd are typically way off when it comes to understanding the environmental impact of AI compared to the environmental impact of other typical daily activities.
- jmathai 2y agoThis is a dilemma I'm deferring making a decision about on my most recent product (named Preppy [1]). I created an app which simplifies meal planning by letting you add ingredients for any online recipe to your grocery store's shopping cart for pickup or delivery. It uses LLMs for many things including parsing ingredients from the site. The ethical dilemma is that the recipe website owners have spent time creating and publishing these recipes. They make their money by people visiting their site and clicking on ads. My app reduces a user's dependency on their recipe site once they've added a recipe to Preppy. I'm genuinely interested in ways my app can benefit users and recipe website owners. I don't know what that solution is yet but would love to figure this out. Generally speaking, I don't think these recipe website owners are going to come out ahead with the availability of LLMs. [1] https://getpreppy.app https://getpreppy.app
- flashgordon 2y agoHow about share revenue with them? Sadly if you don't do it, someone else will (not condoning it). You might as place yourself as a channel for them and incentivised to create more recipes for you?
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoAgreed. The brave/BAT model fits here: create an "account" for each recipe author (could just be an entry in the database), and set aside money for each of them. Then reach out to each one and say: "hey do you want this money?"
- jmathai 2y agoThat's a great idea. Recipe authors can be compensated by the number of times Preppy adds their recipe to a user's grocery store's online cart.
- __MatrixMan__ 2y agoI imagine it would be cumbersome to manage many relationships with recipe authors and that the actual payments made would be small enough that it might not be worth the effort to set up. Imagine being a recipe author and having 15 or 20 AI app authors trying to each give you $0.25 a month. At some point it makes sense to handle flows like that without requiring the humans to explicitly set them up, at which point you might as well use BAT, but since so many are allergic to crypto--with good reason--maybe that's a non starter also.
- legutierr 2y agoI don’t think you have deferred resolving the dilemma—you have firmly decided the question in favor of your product and the LLMs you are using!
- jmathai 2y agoSure, that's one way of looking at it. My product may fall flat on it's face (most likely outcome) so I wasn't interested in solving the problem before I had it. But my mindset isn't YOLO. I genuinely would like to find a mutually beneficial way for it to work. Lots of ideas like revenue share but I'm hoping other ideas emerge.
- wilg 2y agoFWIW here's how I resolve the article's questions currently: 1. Energy usage: Using electricity is not unethical. For many reasons we need to transition Earth to use clean energy. This is not a reason to not use new technology, nor is deep learning particularly wasteful like blockchains are. 2. Training data: Seems reasonable to see AI training as fair use. If you disagree, that's fine too, but the legal specifics of the origin of dataset isn't really fundamental to AI training so we can likely just train only on properly sourced data in some way. Many AI use cases don't have this problem anyway, like self-driving. 3. "Replacing people": I don't think you have a right to continue doing the same work your whole life if someone invents a more efficient way of doing it. We shouldn't build an economy around a busywork jobs guarantee. Plus, it's plausible this concern is a moot point, as Noah Smith argues here https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-the https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/plentiful-high-paying-jobs-in-... But I'm happy to do UBI or whatever, though UBI may not be as effective as one would hope. 4. "Incorrect information and bias". Doesn't strike me as a fundamental problem (models will get much better at this), nor an ethical question. Just know the information may be incorrect. Most of it isn't. And LLMs and AI have many use cases beyond retrieving reference information, even if most people just see Google search AI blowing it constantly. 5. Concentrating power: Seems like close-to-state-of-the-art LLMs will be commodified, etc. If it really becomes important I don't see why you couldn't just rustle up some donations for a truly open model or whatever.
- kridsdale1 2y agoAnyone concerned about LLM energy and water use should just stop eating meat. Now they’re massively a net positive contributor.
- 0xcafefood 2y agoIt seems like your claiming that the perceived benefits of eating meat (by those who do) exactly equals the benefits of using ChatGPT. Is that right? If so, I disagree.
- logtempo 2y agoI think the claim is more about people's consistency in their choice. "If you care so much, start to [insert any environmental friendly acivity] and then we can discuss about LLM environmental impact". Which is stupid.
- BeetleB 2y agoIt's as stupid as comparing it with drinking water usage, right?
- BeetleB 2y agoI think he's saying that eating beef in particular is a tremendous amount of CO2 emissions (comparable to driving). Eating other meats has a much lower impact. Not eating meat is even much lower. So one question: No one probably benefits much from beef (vs, say, chicken). So if I were to recast the parent: If you're concerned about energy usage from LLMs, you'll have a larger impact if you stop eating beef (with little impact to your health).
- Filligree 2y agoOf course it doesn’t exactly equal it. Meat takes thousands of times more.
- msp26 2y ago> An article from Tom's Guide last year showed that "a single query on ChatGPT-4 can use up to 3 bottles of water I don't understand how a statement this fucking stupid ever got traction
- tim-kt 2y agoCare to elaborate? I think they are just trying to put into perspective how much resources LLMs are using?
- nickthegreek 2y agotheir perspective was wrong and clickbait. https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai/ https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai/ hard fork did a segment on this recently as well (ep 118, 30min). https://youtu.be/M6H37yRIuWw?si=ZZsS7rexi2O0KVbs&t=1796 https://youtu.be/M6H37yRIuWw?si=ZZsS7rexi2O0KVbs&t=1796
- Capricorn2481 2y agoI don't have much stake in stopping AI usage vs other ways to reduce emissions, but I watched the video. Sasha did a different paper than the one that article refers to. She doesn't really dispute her numbers, she just says it depends on a lot of factors. She does explicitly say it's a non-negligible amount of water, and in other interviews she asks for transparency from closed source AI providers. As for the article, it makes a lot of assumptions. At one point they say speed is a marker of energy usage? I think they meant two models with the same speeds but different costs are a good measure for energy usage, but they hadn't mentioned cost up until this point. So this is an odd paragraph. > GPT-3.5 is widely estimated to be in the ~20B parameter range. GPT-4o is similar in speed to GPT-3.5, which I think is a fair proxy for total power usage (i.e. time spent in GPUs). That’s another 10x improvement right out of the gate. Regardless, I would disagree. - Different hardware will use different amounts of energy for the same speed. We don't know anything about the hardware our sessions are run on except what they have told us. - Just because the cost is cheaper doesn't mean it uses less energy. There's reason to think they are offering a deal to pull users in and burning cash on energy, though I'd agree it's not the full 10x.[1] [1] https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fr0zlg/openai_sees_roughly_5_billion_loss_this_year_on/ https://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1fr0zlg/openai_...
- jongjong 2y agoNot all blockchains use a lot of energy. It is unethical to suggest so without differentiating Proof of Work from Proof of Stake.
- LtWorf 2y agoProof of stake is just "rich guys decide" so it's not very useful is it?
- emtel 2y ago> Another technology that uses a lot of energy is blockchains. I think using public blockchains is almost universally unethical since there are other, better, less harmful options. Part of the harm from blockchains is an absurd amount of energy usage. I'm not filled with confidence in the author after reading this. The absolutely overwhelming majority of blockchain transactions today occur on non-PoW chains which do not consume large amounts of electricity.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- bowsamic 2y agoI refuse to use it because it offloads human cognition into an external prosthetic. Computers and writing are already playing with fire. I’m being unironic because I’m already preempting the “writing is obviously a pure good” comments
- archagon 2y agoDitto. And it's especially problematic when the prosthetic is owned by a state-aligned actor. (What's Tiananmen Square? What's a trans person?)
- alchemyzach 2y agoLLM training has nothing in common with search engine web crawlers, from an ethical standpoint. Web crawlers index your content and direct people to your website, giving the writer some credit (arguably a lot of credit). LLMs gorge themselves on everything youve ever written in order to improve their ability to regurgitate/mimmick intelligence, while rarely ever giving credit to anyone at all. I think the ability to block ai from including your work in its training data is important. Pointless? Maybe. But it should be an option for those who feel strongly enough about it.
- Dwedit 2y agoIt's more about the crawlers acting as a DDOS attack.
- martin-t 2y agoAnd this doesn't even scratch copyleft. Getting credit is nice and all but i publish my stuff under AGPL because i want my users to have the right to modify the software, even if somebody else builds on top of my work. LLMs are being used to launder my code right now and take away my users' right. There were cases where LLMs regurgitated functions verbatim, which caused a bit of uproar on Twitter and that's it. There should be massive lawsuits that take illegally trained LLMs deep into unprofitability. But i guess the west is competing with China now and morality or even legally goes out the widow in a war.
- darioush 2y agoNot sure what the stigma around blockchain energy usage is? Other than bitcoin which remains a large proof of work network, most of the large public blockchains now use a proof of stake mechanism or other forms of consensus that can and do operate on modest hardware. Yes, running them does require some hundreds of machines, but not more than your typical silicon valley darling like Uber or Airbnb would use to run their infrastructure.
- LtWorf 2y agoThe concept of proof of work is the idea of a sick libertarian brain deciding "let's burn electricity to assign value to these bits". Proof of stake isn't much better. It just means the rich guys decide :D
- darioush 2y agoIt's better than JP Morgan decides and you still get your money 3 days later :D
- daxfohl 2y agoWhile each is concerning independently, I see the feedback cycle of 2,3,5 as being the biggest concern. 2: As systems get more powerful, they'll take training data off everything available. On the computer? They'll be capturing screenshots. Walking down the street? They'll be capturing video, GPS, etc. 3: It won't take them long to figure out what you do, and do it for cheaper. Everything you think you're good at will be useless. 5: We might try to pass regulations to prevent that from happening, but those who control these AI systems will have too much power, and their only incentive will be to use it to create a surveillance state, feeding back into 2,3. Less concerned about 1 (long-term, I think a clean power source will be found) and 4 (they'll get better, unless the feedback cycle above creates a motive for intentional disinformation. And hopefully we'll get better at knowing when to trust them in either case).
- blackeyeblitzar 2y agoIn case this helps with ethical concerns, one way to use LLMs more ethically is to use an open source LLM. For example, AI2 has a model called OLMo (https://allenai.org/blog/olmo2 https://allenai.org/blog/olmo2) that is open everything. Their stance is that truly open source models are released with weights, training data, code, and evaluation in full, and thus can be fully inspected and reproduced. They recently also released an iOS app with a variant of this model, called OLMoE (https://allenai.org/blog/olmoe-app https://allenai.org/blog/olmoe-app), that uses a small model that can do on-device inference, for private and secure use. Also the app itself is open source.
- 999900000999 2y agoAbsolutely not. But you can't wear shoes, or buy clothing either. Everything I wear was literally made by people being exploited. Everything I eat, was picked or produced by people being exploited . To function in any way under capitalism is to do so unethically. Because capitalism demands it. Llms are effectively a giant hodgepodge of stolen data, commodified. There's no way around it . However, if LLMS help doctors cure diseases, people learn math, and a variety of other good things, it becomes unethical to not use them . It's a paradox. And a contradiction, all in one. I don't think software engineers who outright refuse to use LLMS will have jobs much longer. Even if it's just printing out some boilerplate code, it's just where the industry's heading.
- daxfohl 2y agoThough from the objectivist standpoint, maybe the real question the blogger is asking is not whether this will lead to exploitation of others, but whether it will lead to exploitation of oneself. Will it lead to mass exploitation of developed-world non-billionaires? And if so, are you being ethical to yourself if you use it?
- 999900000999 2y agoIt's like anything else. The question is probably is a net good. Which no one can say right now. Will LLMs cure cancer or be used in Defense industries. The answer is both. But when you think about it, modern medicine originates as an invention of war, the original idea was to come up with better ways to treat injured soldiers. If you find a cure for disease while trying to wage war, and then that cure saves millions of people, you can't say the war was good. But if it's going to happen, there should be some benefits from it. I have a piece of paper and a pen. I can write a nice letter to a friend, send it and brighten their day. Or I can use it to write a really mean letter. Do we say pens are unethical ?
- daxfohl 2y agoYeah, there's a bit of a prisoner's dilemma there too. If everyone agreed not to use the thing then everyone would be better off (assuming this is what the author is suggesting), but individually you're better off using it in either scenario. So do you contribute to the thing that leads to your own downfall?
- hrkucuk 2y agoDid this submission just got "hidden" from the main HN page or is it just me? If it is hidden, may I ask what was the reason? I am just curious.
- martin-t 2y agoLooks like it got popular and then dropped like a rock. https://hnrankings.info/43106012/ https://hnrankings.info/43106012/ I have a suspicion there is massive (organized?) downvoting going on in the past few weeks or months but hard to prove since hn doesn't make enough data visible.
- hrkucuk 2y agoThanks for your comment and sharing that link! Very useful website. I also have a similar suspicion. Feels like if you have billions of dollars of investment in AI, then crashing things in the internet that criticize you, can easily be solved for a few millions. If this is the case, for me, it is the biggest proof that AI won't live up to the hype.
- martin-t 2y agoI wanted to say it doesn't have to be planned from the top because people naturally want to flock to a cause. But I also remembered a certain billionaire paying people to play computer games under his account to boost his stats. Paying people or bots to downvote criticism is certainly not below him or any of the others, it's just marketing expenditure.
- grigio 2y agoI think people should stop to use banks and electronic payments, they use too much energy, and also gaming on GPU, too much energy.. and also to use USD it funds too many wars.
- waltercool 2y ago[dead]
- edanm 2y ago> When we put people out of work, we—both society and technologists—have an ethical responsibility to ensure there's a plan to mitigate the harm from that. This is my major disagreement with the argument. I think she's giving too much moral weight on what the technologists creating the technology, or even using the technology, have to do here. I don't think it was incumbent on the scientists first discovering electricity, to figure out how to mitigate the vast societal upheaval of all the jobs that would be lost because of it. I don't think I've ever stopped eating things grown in a field because the technology for farming has made 99% of farmers lose their job, with one person working the field with specialized machines doing the job of dozens. Nor have I expected the people creating new farming technologies to worry about the ethical implications of making farmers' jobs easier. I'm pretty sure, in fact, that most of the world just says "thank you" that more food can be grown and harvested, and far more cheaply at that. I do think society has to worry about this issue, both morally and practically, but not specifically the people creating the technology. In fact, I think it's a bit of hubris we in the technology community have, that we think because we created a technology, we are best suited to understand the implications of it or how to deal with it on a socio-economic-political level, when there are entire fields of study about those topics which most technologists are not acquainted with.
- t0bia_s 2y agoBack then when film was invented, people believed that photography stole a part of their soul every time they was captured and replicated. Since then, artist stop with attempt to paint realistic reproductions on canvas and all kind of *ism was a reaction (impressionism, expressionism...). We live in similar times. AI is new tool that opens new possibilities and force us about rethinking about certain things, such as education, authenticity of consumed media, meaning of art, etc.