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I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with ever

I ran the numbers on Sam Altman flippant statement about wasted energy, and found roughly 40000 human 20 year old lives worth of energy are exchanged with every frontier model training-cycle release at OpenAI. Some history... Westinghouse Electric sold turbines to power stations in the 1950s, and promoted electronic home appliances to drive energy consumption to close the sales loop. While the scheme was not a direct business success, for society it improved just about every Americans living standards. The problem is LLM cost resources, broke that loop, and only bids down the quality of life people can afford. You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes. This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3

bitpush 1mo ago
> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes. This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3 Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such. Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.
- Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
  >if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Regulatory-captured markets have nothing to do with free competition, or bidding down price pressures. You do have monopolistic competitive firms drawing $4Tn in loans to artificially hyper-scale demands for NVIDIA hardware that earns you -$2.50 for every $1 in revenue. Your home heating bill may double this winter because the economic engine is currently post-consumer/broken. We shall see how this plays out. =3

bitpush 1mo ago

> You pay more, have less, and reduce taxable labor incomes into demand deficient classes. This will not end well for people even if LLM are recognized as mostly hype. =3 Depends on how you view efficient market hypothesis. Computers and Memory was prohibitively expensive. "Putting a computer in every one's desk" was literal rallying cry for Microsoft because it appeared audacious, just like saying "Unlimited LLM usage for every man, woman and child" or some such. Will it happen? Nope, but if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Heck, we dig plant juice out of the earth from deep sea oil rigs so that I can fill up my car to go walmart to buy soda. Pretty preposterous when you think about the closed loop.

Joel_Mckay 1mo ago
>if the technology is useful the markets it'll spur competition and prices will come down. Regulatory-captured markets have nothing to do with free competition, or bidding down price pressures. You do have monopolistic competitive firms drawing $4Tn in loans to artificially hyper-scale demands for NVIDIA hardware that earns you -$2.50 for every $1 in revenue. Your home heating bill may double this winter because the economic engine is currently post-consumer/broken. We shall see how this plays out. =3