4 ms·
Human Existence Is Just as Wasteful as AI Data Centers, Sam Altman Suggests
- WalterGR 8mo ago94 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112633 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47112633 16 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108221 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47108221
- hulitu 8mo agoHe speaks for himself.
- boesboes 8mo agoSam is best satirized word-for-word
- cestith 8mo agoIf we put Sam and Jensen together as the guests in a HN or Slashdot AMA thread, I’m not sure we could tell them from a poorly trained LLM.
- warpspin 8mo agoSome things sound very clever in your head until you say them aloud.
- blitzar 8mo agoIt is better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubt
- dtj1123 8mo agoAssuming his brain consumed the usual 20W, throughout his lifetime Einstein's grey matter would have gotten through about 4.6 billion Joules. Some napkin maths tells me ChatGPT consumes that much in about 2.8 milliseconds. I don't think we're there yet.
- stratos123 8mo agoThe first number is off by an order of magnitude or two, and your napkin math estimate is higher than humanity's entire power production. Are you a human?
- dtj1123 8mo agoLast I checked, yes I am indeed human. Are you implying I'm a language model because you think my maths is wrong? Ok let's see, 20 Watts is 20 joules per second. Einstein was alive for about 75 years, so that's 75x365x24x60x60 seconds by 20 Joules per second which is 47,304,000,000 Joules. So you are correct, I dropped an order of magnitude. Based on the numbers here: https://www.businessenergyuk.com/knowledge-hub/chatgpt-energy-consumption-visualized/ https://www.businessenergyuk.com/knowledge-hub/chatgpt-energ... ChatGPT gets through 39.98 million kWh per day, or 1.4 x 10e14 Joules per day, about 1.6 x 10e9 Joules per second. 47,304,000,000 / 1,665,000,000 is about 28.4 seconds. So you're right on two counts, I'm off by an order of magnitude and an erroneous milli prefix. Napkin maths huh. I think the original point I was trying to make stands though.
- breakitmakeit 8mo agoIt would be funnier if ww3 wasn't about to happen with this logic
- sombragris 8mo agoCall human existence "wasteful" is the epitome of hubris and incredibly dehumanizing. Shows what's on the mind of many Silicon Valley exec types.
- NedF 8mo ago[dead]
- expedition32 8mo agoLook on the bright side Silicon Valley is terrible at politics. We still live in a democracy and none of these tech bros have the charisma or debate skills to get their own mother to vote for them.
- millerm 8mo agoThey have $. They pay others to execute their plans. There is no bright side.
- entropicdrifter 8mo agoWho do you think is behind the current Vice President?
- trolleski 8mo agoThis man is not right, and I don't mean only this opinion, something's seriously off.
- libertine 8mo agoIt's the "new deep state" standard.
- motbus3 8mo agoI agree that people like him are just waste.
- steve-atx-7600 8mo agoI’m thinking less and less about this guy. Gemini is good enough or better than ChatGPT for general purpose use. Codex is slow and rarely outperforms Claude code for my software work. How many billions or trillions is he in the hole again?
- kaboomshebang 8mo agoI didn't know AI can already take care of my grandma, cook meals, wash, clean-up, fix my car... ;) ;)
- osullish 8mo agoSometimes when I read things like this I despair - AI could be game changing, targetting complex issues around health, genetics etc. Instead its deployed mainly in the continued transfer of wealth from the ordinary man to the billionaire classes. We're ripe for a 'French' style revolution.
- 1718627440 8mo agoWhat does he think, how wasteful a human existence is that promotes AI data centers?
- thunderfork 8mo agoThis would imply that AI data centers are somehow separate, and not just a further increment to the wastefulness of human existence, which is obvious nonsense. He really goes out of his way to seem like a hack - you'd think he could get some coaching from his synthetic buddy or whatever.
- amai 8mo agoSam Altmans existence is especially wasteful; for the wealth of his investors.
- deleted 8mo ago[deleted]
- howdyhowdy 8mo agoCan you smell the desperation of these grifters? Whataboutism on a hilarious scale
- nyc_data_geek1 8mo agoRemember when he said he couldn't imagine raising a human child without AI? Why are we still pretending this man is anything but a middle-distance gazing charlatan selling snake oil?
- poulpy123 8mo agoI'm not the best at communicating to say the least, but even me I know how not to be insane
- elzbardico 8mo agoSooner or later we would have to face the fact that Sam Altman is a deeply peculiar human being and that his personal values, core motivations, goals and ideas are not exactly healthy pro-social ones. Indeed, we should REALLY start to try to understand the concrete potential implications of the fact that people like Altman and Thiel may not have our best interests in their minds viz. the incredible power they control.