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> How is anti pollution argument pro ai? What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who com
by Zambyte 1mo ago
> How is anti pollution argument pro ai?
What? (Edit: I think you misread "in support of their primary concern, being AI" as "in support of AI"? People who complain about pollution are usually mostly concerned about AI, and they use arguments of pollution to strengthen their argument against AI related things.)
> And even if you do inference at home you are not training the models.
No, and training does use a large amount of energy on a large amount of hardware. But:
- That sort of workload doesn't really require many distributed data centers, only a few powerful ones. I believe training is also getting cheaper for the achieving higher levels of capabilities, but I don't think the efficiency advancement has been as dramatic as it has been for inference.
- I believe we are really hitting a wall of diminishing returns, especially at the high end of large models. There is lower demand for training, because models are good enough to have a reasonably long shelf life at this point. Year+ old models that were SOTA in their time are still useful today. The demand for training is going down.
> Moreover, most people certainly are not doing inference locally.
Maybe not, but I think most people who go out of their way to use LLMs because they find them useful for their work actually are. Though most inference is probably from people who do it accidentally (as a part of a search result or something) or students who don't have the resources to do it themselves. But basically every software engineer that I personally know that uses AI for programming is either running their inference on their own hardware, or is talking about building a rig to do it.
- bamboozled 1mo agoIt’s wild to accuse people who are anti pollution of being anti ai, look how fucked the climate is, people don’t want to see it more fucked , is that hard to understand ?
- Zambyte 1mo agoIt's not hard to understand. What's hard to understand is why when I bring up how cars are literally orders of magnitude larger polluters and how we need to eradicate personal car use, people suddenly stop caring about pollution, and continue to beat the anti-AI drum. See: they were anti-AI the whole time, and pollution was just an attempt at supporting their anti-AI argument.
- bamboozled 1mo agoI guess you’ve never heard of electric cars and rooftop solar ?
- Zambyte 1mo agoAI doesn't rub rubber on asphalt at 70 mph. Did you know that? Electric cars and ICE cars both use more watts than AI. If you're concern is energy consumption, cars are worse. If your concern is pollution, cars are worse. Do you care about pollution and energy consumption, or do you honestly just hate AI? It's okay if you just hate AI, but be honest about it.
- bamboozled 1mo agoBack to the original objection from me, it's fine to object to data centers of being concerned for the environment. You can even like AI and still realize that we need to make sure the data centers are being powered by low / zero emission technologies. Because as you obviously can tell, it's totally ridiculous to suggest people give up their primary mode of transport so people can have data centers instead. The people who grow your food aren't going to be doing that on a bus. The people who build and run data centers need cars to do it.
- Zambyte 1mo agoI never suggested people should abandon cars for AI, I think people should abandon their primary mode of transportation for the same arguments that people usually make against AI. Cars have the same negative effects times 10 per person who uses it, and a lot moe people are addicted to cars than AI. And that's before we mention things like the massive amount of straight up violence cars induce that is swept under the rug as inevitable. I'm not sure what you think farmers need personal cars for? Tractors and trains seem like they'd do literally anything you could imagine a farmer "needing" a car for?
- bamboozled 1mo ago