3 ms·
Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It become
by robinsonb5 1y ago
Ultimately we're trying to persuade people to reduce their quality of life in order to reduce their energy footprint. That's already a difficult sell. It becomes an impossible sell when any reductions that might be achieved are immediately offset by a new energy-hungry technology coming online - especially when the long-term effect (goal, even) is to reduce yet further the quality of life of everyday people.
- roywiggins 1y agoconvincing people to change anything is very hard, so why are people spending time wringing their hands over LLM use? if you convinced one person to go vegan or get into cold showers for a year you'd do more for the planet than convincing a hundred people not to pick up ChatGPT
- robinsonb5 1y agoI'm actually not wringing my hands over people choosing to use LLMs - I'm wringing my hands over the irresponsibility of the tech world in introducing and making available a technology whose existence will be responsible for a big chunk of the expected doubling of datacentre energy use over the next decade. But the environmental aspects aren't even my main concern: my main concern is where that energy is coming from - and how the idea of Three Mile Island being restarted solely for Microsoft's benefit marks a huge shift (that no-one seems to have noticed) towards infrastructure that was previously at least nominally for public use being reserved for the use of a private corporation. I'm also annoyed by the kleptocratic attitude towards training data, but I'll happily accept that reasonable minds may differ on that subject. So while I don't use LLMs myself for ethical reasons, I don't have a problem with other people choosing to use them.