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> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novice
by minimaxir 1y ago
> A lot more people will be able to create software, and art. But the world wants a lot more of both, and experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools.
This isn't correct: people want good software and good art, and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs.
> As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. (People are often curious about how much energy a ChatGPT query uses; the average query uses about 0.34 watt-hours
This is the first time a number has been given in terms of ChatGPT's cost-per-query and is obviously much lower than the 3 watts still cited by detractors, but there's a lot of asterisks in how that number might be calculated (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?).
- vjerancrnjak 1y agoPeople don’t know what’s good without time. Even then many things fall through. Most art is just meh and earns billions. I don’t see AI stealing art. Most modern arts have a huge social component.
- jcelerier 1y ago> people want good software and good art, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k85mRPqvMbE
- minimaxir 1y agoThere's a difference between a 2000's character brute-forced through millions of advertising dollars to sell ringtones to children, and whatever the hell is happening in the https://www.meta.ai/ https://www.meta.ai/ Discover feed. One aspect about modern generative AI that has surprised me is that it should have resulted in a new age of creatively surreal shitposts, but instead we have people Ghiblifying themselves and pictures of Trump eating tacos.
- bongodongobob 1y agoWhy would you expect the average person to have exceptional taste to produce things you like? Go listen to a random Spotify track, you probably won't like that either. Art still needs to be curated and given some direction. Metas random AI feed created by the average FB user is indicative of nothing.
- xwiz 1y agoSurreal shitposting you say? https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE3EhrZyCVd/ https://www.instagram.com/reel/DE3EhrZyCVd/
- etrautmann 1y agoNeuralviz is definitely surreal but I wouldn’t call it shitposting. It’s hand-written satire scripts with gen-ai video (honestly quite well done if you go through a bunch of them).
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y ago> is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here? That's how electricity is most commonly priced. What else would you want?
- minimaxir 1y agoIt's more that every time the topic has come up, it's reported in watts and I'm not sure if there's a nuance I'm missing. It's entirely possible those reports have been in watt-hours though and using watts for shorthand. I still find the Technology Connections video counterintuitive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OOK5xkFijPc
- moab 1y agoWatt-hours is the only unit that makes sense here as we're describing the energy cost of some calculation. Watt, a rate unit, is not appropriate.
- antihero 1y agoI mean you could use joule but wH is better.
- onlyrealcuzzo 1y agoA watt wouldn't make any sense. A watt needs a time unit to be converted to joules because a watt is a measure of power, while a joule is a measure of energy. Think of it like speed and distance: A watt is a RATE of energy use, just like speed (e.g., miles per hour) is a RATE of travel. A joule is a total amount of energy, just like distance (e.g., miles) is a total amount of travel. If you're traveling 60 mph but you don't specify for how long... You won't know how far you went, how much gas you used, etc.
- roywiggins 1y agoWatt-hours are what matter. If you want to boil a kettle, you need to use a certain minimum amount of watt-hours to do it, which corresponds to, say, burning a certain amount of propane. If you care about how many times you can boil a kettle on a bottle of propane, you care about the watt-hours expended. If you had perfect insulation you could boil a kettle by applying barely any watts for a long enough time and it would take the same amount of propane. There are situations where Watts per se matter, eg if you build a datacenters in an area that doesn't have enough spare electricity capacity to generate enough watts to cover you, and you'd end up browning out the grid. Or you have a faulty burner and can't pump enough watts into your water to boil it before the heat leaks out, no matter how long you run it.
- blibble 1y ago> As datacenter production gets automated, the cost of intelligence should eventually converge to near the cost of electricity. what he has left unsaid, is that electricity demand will rise substantially good luck heating your home when you're competing with "superintelligence" for energy
- actuallyalys 1y agoYep, watt-hours are correct. Think of it this way: Power supplies and laptop chargers are rated in watts and that represents how much energy they can pull from the wall at a point in time. If you wanted to know how much energy a task takes on your computer and you know it maxes out your 300 watt desktop [0] for an entire hour, that would take 300 watt-hours. [0] To my knowledge, no desktops are built to max out their power supply for an extended time; this is a simplification for illustration purposes.
- theptip 1y agoWatt-hours seem good right now, and rebut the current arguments that LLMs are wasteful. They might soon stop being the right lens, if your agents can go off and (in parallel) expend some arbitrary and borderline-unknowable budget of energy on a single request. At some point you’ll need to measure in terms of $ earned per W-H, or just $out/$in.
- actuallyalys 1y agoTo be clear, I'm only saying the unit is correct, not whether the number of watt-hours is accurate or (assuming it is correct) that it's a good amount to spend on each query.
- theptip 1y agoFair, I was trying to make a broader point without being clear about it :)
- actuallyalys 1y agoGotcha, thanks for clarifying!
- tsimionescu 1y ago(average) Watt-hours would still be the right unit to measure that, if the question is about energy efficiency / environmental impact. You still care how much energy those agents consume to achieve a given task, and the time it takes for tasks is still variable, so you need to multiply by time. Money is irrelevant to energy efficiency.
- Davidzheng 1y agoAlso not clear that experts will be better at novices necessarily if the AI is massively better than both
- Workaccount2 1y ago>and the current trajectory of how LLMs are used on average in the real world unfortunately run counter to that. This post doesn't offer any forecasts on the hallucination issues of LLMs. You are getting confused here... LLMs are terrible at doing software engineering jobs. They fall on their face trying to work in sprawling codebases. However, they are excellent at writing small bespoke programs on behalf of regular people. Becky doesn't need ChatGPT to one-shot Excel.exe to keep track of the things she sells at the craft fair that afternoon. This is a huge blind-spot I keep seeing people miss. LLM "programmers" are way way more useful to regular people than they are to career programmers.
- Avicebron 1y agoThat's great, but Becky at the farmer's market doesn't want to be re-inventing notepad on her computer to sell sourdough. This smells like "Self-checkouts", "perfect bespoke solution so that everyone can check their own groceries out, no need to wait for a slow/expensive _human_ to get the job done, except you end up basically just doing the cashiers job and waiting around inconveniently whenever you want to get some beer
- satvikpendem 1y agoAnd yet I'd much rather self checkout than have a cashier do it for me.
- kulahan 1y agoIt feels like “virtual stuck behind a bus”, then doing the company a favor for the experience.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1y agoAt Costco, they forced me to empty out my very fat cart and scan each item individually. That's when I realized the value of cashiers.
- libraryatnight 1y ago
- deadbabe 1y agoHow many watts does a human brain need to produce a response to a query?
- nharada 1y agoI think you should include the entire body for your comparison, not just the brain. We're not just measuring the GPUs, we're measuring the datacenter.
- physix 1y agohttps://www.quantamagazine.org/how-much-energy-does-it-take-to-think-20250604/ https://www.quantamagazine.org/how-much-energy-does-it-take-... :-)
- hdjdbdirbrbtv 1y agoIIRC ( and it was 20 years ago now that I learnt this) the brain uses 20% of the body's resting energy usage. Most of that is keeping neurons polarised to the outside (ion pumps need ATP!!!). The body uses 25w resting and thus the brain is about 5w. Source: biology degree but like I said please take with the same amount of weight as a hallucinating LLM.
- apt-apt-apt-apt 1y agoGPT says: Unless you're a hamster hooked up to a Fitbit, it's more like 60–70W for a normal adult human. So the brain’s real power draw is more like 15–20W, not 5W Resting energy usage in humans is ~1200–1500 kcal/day, or about 60–70 watts, depending on the person. Logic holds, estimate is just low
- hdjdbdirbrbtv 1y agoLol thanks for the correction! like I said... it had been 20 years.. I misremembered the amounts :P
- jumploops 1y ago> people want good software Absolutely! We’re in an interesting time, and LLMs are certainly over-hyped. With that said, I’d argue that most software today is _average_. Not necessarily bad by design, but average because of the (historic) economies of software development. We’ve all seen it: some beloved software tool that fills a niche. They raise funding/start to scale and all of a sudden they need to make this software work for more people. The developers remove poweruser features, add functionality to make it easier to use, and all of a sudden the product is a shell of its former self. This is what excites me about LLMs. Now we can build software for 10s or 100s of users, instead of only building software with the goal (and financial stability) of a billion users. My hope is that, even with tons of terrible vibe coded atrocities littering the App Store/web, we’ll at least start to see some software that was better than before, because the developers can focus on the forest rather than each individual tree (similar to Assembly -> C -> Python).
- bgwalter 1y ago> experts will probably still be much better than novices, as long as they embrace the new tools. Sure, we'll all get a subscription and subject ourselves to biometric verification in order to continue our profession. OpenAI's website looks pretty bad. Shouldn't it be the best website in existence if the new Übermensch programmers rely on "AI"? What about the horrible code quality of "AI" applications in the "scientific" Python sphere? Shouldn't the code have been improved by "AI"? So many questions and no one shows us the code.
- chrismartin 1y agoHey Sam, does 0.34 watt-hours per query include an amortization of the energy consumed to train the model, or only the marginal energy consumed by inference? I used to believe this wasn't worth considering (because while training is energy-intensive, once the model is trained we can use it forever.) But in practice it seems like we switch to newer/better models every few months, so a model has a limited period of usefulness. > (is watt-hours the right unit of measurement here?) Yes, because we want to measure energy consumed, while watts is only a measure of instantaneous power.
- nradov 1y agoWhether software is good or not doesn't matter in most cases. Sure, quality matters for software used by millions. But for little bespoke applications good enough is fine. People will tolerate a lot of crap as long as it's cheap and gets the job done.