Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.
“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”
The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It’s so tiring.
That’s because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.
Ypu know what I don’t hear on lemmy? People complaining that crypto world consumes more energy than AI world and one of those is far more useless in grand scheme of things.
So how comes it is A issue for AI, but everyone seemingly has forgotten about crypto?
Last I heard, securing one transaction on chain is equalivent to powering US household for many days (feel free to fact check). In comparison, generating LLM text for entire hour on your PC is pretty much the same as gaming for two hours (very approx., your gpu is unlikely at 100% load), which means gaming world is far more destructive energy wise. Are you getting triggered yet?
lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It’s so tiring.
Are you fucking serious? All I ever see on Lemmy is prople saying “AI slop” over and over and over and over again… in like every comment section of every post. It could be a picture that was actually hand-drawn, or a photograph that was definitely not AI, or articles written by someone “sounding like AI”. The AI hate on Lemmy is WAY overpowering any support.
I think you misunderstood me here as we’re in agreement already
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Does the article answer the question of what is the footprint of a prompt?
Depends on the prompt, the model, the parameters, which DCs, time of day, location in the world, and other factors. They answer the question but there’s so many variables that can affect footprint (and big hyperscalers do not release this data so you have to under a lot)
Basically nothing worth getting angry about
The matrix is getting more and more real every day
as it gets better
Bold assumption.
Historically AI always got much better. Usually after the field collapsed in an AI winter and several years went by in search for a new technique to then repeat the hype cycle. Tech bros want it to get better without that winter stage though.
Historically “AI” still doesn’t exist.
Technically even 1950s computer chess is classified as AI.
The issue this time around is infrastructure. The current AI Summer depends on massive datacenters with equally massive electrical needs. If companies can’t monetize that enough, they’ll pull the plug and none of this will be available to general public anymore.
This system can go backwards. Yes, the R&D will still be there after the AI Winter cycle hits, but none of the infrastructure.
AI usually got better when people realized it wasn’t going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.
Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.
The major thing that killed 1960s/70s AI was the Vietnam War. MIT’s CSAIL was funded heavily by DARPA. When public opinion turned against Vietnam and Congress started shutting off funding, DARPA wasn’t putting money into CSAIL anymore. Congress didn’t create an alternative funding path, so the whole thing dried up.
That lab basically created computing as we know it today. It bore fruit, and many companies owe their success to it.
I wish there was an alternate history forum or novel that explores this scenario.
Pretty sure “AI” didn’t exist in the 60s/70s either.
Yes, it did. Most of the basic research came from there. The first section of the book “Hackers” by Steven Levy is a good intro.
Like the cliché goes: when it works, we don’t call it AI anymore.
The smart move is never calling it “AI” in the first place.
Unless you’re in comp sci, and AI is a field, not a marketing term. And in that case everyone already knows that’s not “it”.
The spice must flow
Each winter marks the beginning and end of a generation of AI. We are now seeing more progress and as long as there is no technical limit it seems that its progress will not be interrupted.
What progress are we seeing?
In what area of AI? Image generation is increasing in Lagos and bounds. Video generation even more so. Image reconstruction for games (DLSS, XeSS, FSR) is having generational improvements almost every year. AI chatbots are getting much much smarter seemingly every month.
What’s one main application of AI that hasn’t improved?
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Which chatbots are getting smarter?
I know AI has potential, but specifically LLMs (which most people mean when talking about AI) seem to have hit their technological limits.
Advanced Reasoning models came out like 4 months ago lol
Advanced reasoning? Having LLM talk to itself?
They’ve been a boon for medical diagnoses as well, I believe.
Has anyone made AI powered accounting software yet? I’d love to tell my computer ‘Here’s all my financial information in a big heap. Do my taxes.’ The numbers and tax laws are all known things. It shouldn’t be hard.
Any strictly rule-based system, like accounting and taxes, is a job for traditional software, not AI. Particularly when the laws change every year.
Once it has the information in a recognisable format. Reading and recognising random receipts, bank statements, payment slips, and whatever and sorting it into a coherent format is what I’m trying to avoid.
NVL72 will be enormously impactful on high end performance.
Yeah, I think there was some efforts, until we found out that adding billions of parameters to a model would allow both to write the useless part in emails that nobody reads and to strip out the useless part in emails that nobody reads.
I want my emails to be a series of noises that only computers can hear and communicate with
Fire bad, who cook with fire, fire burn, fire pollute, fire baaaaad
Yes, “AI” is literally contributing to the burning of the planet.
https://www.cleanairfund.org/news-item/wildfires-climate-change-and-air-pollution-a-vicious-cycle/
So is the computer you’re using
Nothing wrong with examining potential issues for emerging technology before they become actual issues.
For sure, and I agree. But that isn’t what happens around here. Instead we turn to panic rather than skepticism. We are cynical more than anything. And I don’t trust cynicism about topical subjects.
This wasn’t well reasoned objectivism. It was journalist and artist fearing for their jobs about technology they don’t understand. They generate a lot of content to generate panic. The mob saw the panic and adopted it. You’re not a true lefty unless you accept that AI is some new danger to the threat of the lowly creative.
What’s your point here?
They’re trying to compare “AI” to fire. If you don’t see the point, I can’t blame you.
How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.
It should be clarified that it’s 99.99% Bitcoin mining that’s wasting all that energy, any other crypto that still uses mining is basically irrelevant when compared to it
I found this article from last year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364
Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.
The wide range should not be too surprising, it’s a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the “industry”, I can only imagine it consuming even more now.
That’s a huge amount of electricity even at it’s lowest. Are they building the AI to crypto mine is also another question. I could see these sneaky bastards combining the two somehow.
I don’t see how AI helps with crypto mining. It could help with pump and dumping shit coins though.
I was thinking how it probably helps by getting into nanoseconds with buying and selling stocks. I have found that there are very few coincidences with huge technologies, tons of cash pouring in and dark money. I could be wrong though.
I see you don’t know how crypto works lol
As for OpenAI and Microsoft, they’re betting on energy with a company called Helion Energy. They say they’ll have it ready by 2028. Whether they’ll achieve that? We’ll see.
I looked that up and it’s a fusion reactor, apparently, from what I can figure out from their nigh-illegible website.
…[reads further] …
It skips the steam cycle. That’s fucking cool. I really hope they get it working.
They won’t.
Care to elaborate?
No.
Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, ‘outside the environment’. Is this a stupid idea?
Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.
I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.
It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won’t melt.
I thought so.
Launch cost is astronomical.
Maintenance access is horrible.
Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.
If the end goal is so little Timmy can ask a robot if nazis exist and it spits out misinformation or so Ai bots can flood social media with endless regurgitated bullshit, then no, it’s just more garbage in space.
Ai is interesting,… necessary? A lot of people can be fed and housed for the cost of giant, experimental solar powered Ai computers in space so that they have more excuses not to pay people a living wage.
When I think about the potential of AI, I like to think of Iain M. Banks’ Culture more than Skynet. We could probably all live in a post-scarcity society even without AI if we put our minds into it, but let’s free ourselves of unnecessary or unwilling labour while we’re at it, eh?
I’m glad someone’s hopeful. Any time I see a new technology, I wonder what the worst possible outcome could be, and it usually makes it there.
Sorry, I just have zero faith in humanity.
You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that’s sitting out in the sun.
Afaik space isn’t self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.
Do you know how much energy you need to launch a kilogram into Earth orbit?
I assume yes, I know very little but I know space is very hard and harsh environment. Also it would be very expensive I assume. And it would need to be big.
Its worth it for school essays and prawn jesus though.
At some point, someone said the same thing about:
- electricity
- books
- cars
- computers
- medicine
- houses
Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.
Cars are literally privileged garbage that’s destroying the planet. Great comparison on that one.
Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.
Well only one of those is allowed to exist so you figure it out.
When AI was getting popular, the media released an absolute war against it. A lot of us are swayed by what the media tell us
That’s probably going to be one of the main weapons against us, the media generating fake news using AI to control us.
As opposed to what?
The true news we have today?
At least with AI, I can ask it to link you research on media literacy and propaganda and compare the article I just read to give it a bullshit score
I’m genuinely excited about the possibilities of AI, just not in the hands of a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts.
I completely agree. However the genie is out of the bottle. Not much we can do to prevent it at this point, but there is plenty we can do to learn about it and defend against is abuse against us.
We could nationalise it. Unless the government is also a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts, of course.
Realistically not going to happen anytime soon in the US at least.
There’s always China… fuck.
A better analogy for AI is the discovery of asbestos or the invention of single-use plastics. Terrible fucking idea.
I think it’s probably a bit early to tell for certain on that assessment. There is definitely pros and cons to all technology. Electricity production causes environmental damage, building wooden houses require logging. Plastics are a byproduct of a withering industry. Asbestos might have saved more lives than it took, but there were probably much better ways to solve fire resistant buildings.
Why all these destructive things? Capitalism requires maximizing profits above all else. So, really the question is how will capitalism fuck us over with AI? So, so many ways. That’s why it’s important that we build community understanding of this technology in order to combat it. It’s not going away. It’s here to stay. So we either put our heads in the sand and pretend it’s not here or we can embrace it and learn how it works and how to defeat it and come up with open source tooling to combat it.
I’m in the latter camp. I love technology breakthroughs and want to learn first hand the capabilities to understand how it will be used against me and how I can use it.
Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?
Well, it’s a bit better than that, simply because you can train AI with solar power. Probably nobody does that currently, as it’s easier, faster-to-market and probably (for whatever corrupt reason) cheaper for business to let it run on burning fossils/nuclear. Currently there’s an insane amount of waste, often 1000s of models are trained and only the best performing one is deployed - and then it’s just a fancy autocomplete. The better use is for prediction of material failure, new medicine and protein folding, generally improved processes.
With asbestos you get some convenience, but it’ll be for eternity a pain to find a waste management facility that will accept it.
You might have heard of these fossil fuels we’re busily running out of. And fossil is still 80% of primary energy use so there is no renewable energy transition, and renewable infrastructure is being built almost exclusively using fossil fuels.
So this means future energy rationing. What’s the business case for AI?
What’s the business case for AI?
printing money by deception. oh and also votes, probably.
Also telling me how to install arch Linux but sing it to me as a Kenny Loggins
Verse 1 Reboot your rig and hit the USB, Boot it up live from the Arch IS-OOOHH-B! You’re in the zone now, terminal’s lit, You gotta ping that net and make sure it’s legit!
(CHORUS) Highway to the Arch install, (Gonna fly into the…) Highway to the Arch install!
Verse 2 Partition time with cfdisk — no fear, Format your root with mkfs.ext4 my dear. Mount it up with a little mount /dev/sdX, Now you’re rolling smooth, yeah you’re onto the next!
(CHORUS) Highway to the Arch install, (Gonna fly into the…) Highway to the Arch install!
Bridge Mirror, mirror, set 'em fast, reflector knows how to make that last. Then pacstrap /mnt base linux — so fly, Installin’ Arch, baby, you’re touching the sky!
(Slow breakdown) genfstab, then chroot in, Now you’re living life like a power sysadmin…
Final Chorus – belt it! Highway to the Arch install, You’re flying, configuring it aaaaall! Bootloader, locale, make that call — You’re livin’ the dream with no safety net at all!
Highway… to the Arch install…
Restricting our energy use is not a very good end game. We need to learn how to unlock more energy production without destruction of the environment. This will happen through technological development. Temporarily rationing or conservation may be needed, but permanent is not the answer.
May I interest you in this resource? https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9js5291m
I’m not interested in books championing our reduction of human expansion. I want to see us reach out into the stars one day. Technological development and progress is needed. We need to also change our mindset on current systems. E.g., if it doesn’t maximize return on investment, forget about it. If there is a way to do it slightly cheaper even if it’s detrimental, do it cheaper. That mindset sucks.
Just develop fully autopoietic artificial photosynthetic systems. Piece of cake.
I don’t think books ever had the same amount of discussion of how they impact our global carbon footprint, and where it comes to “houses” - I doubt people in the neolithic said about their new invention what is being discussed with AI. It is a disingenuous comparison. (And sure, someone somewhere may have said something like that about basically anything, but usually not a large part of professionals from within the field, like is the case with AI.)
This is also not simply Ludditism, the nature of how AI is used currently goes far beyond where it is genuinely useful in a case of investor hype FOMO, and the hidden costs for our efforts against climate change are real, as are the problems for creatives - who sadly need a lot of the “bullshit work” that AI can substitute to survive while honing their craft - as is the quality drop in journalism, as are fundamental questions about how far generative AI models can truly evolve in quality for the massive amount of energy invested, so the usual “just wait until the tech gets better” is not the easy way out to justify draining said energy (and fresh water) on top of what crypto mining has been wasting with data centres in the past years.
Now, those problems aren’t simply problems of the technology, but also of how that technology manifests within market dynamics. But the technology still is not just neutral, and even if we view it as an inevitability, that inevitability does not have to manifest without regulation and within the context of hyped, often unwanted application to basically everything.
Without mechanisms to address problems and to enforce regulation, in lieu of fundamental changes to what market/investment dynamics demand, this is indeed a very questionable technology at this point. And also: To truly love something abstract, like “technology”, means being able to - sometimes harshly - criticise it. Think the meme of a “tech bro” with a fully automated house vs the IT guy who barely has tech stuff beyond their PC and some stuff tinkered on passionately in their own time.
I’m not sure regulation is going to be an open for this in the US anytime soon. Maybe EU can show us the way.
What benefit for society does this crop of large language models and generative “AI” offer?
We already see students use it for homework, meaning they don’t learn their stuff.
We also see people treat the output of LLMs as gospel truth, despite the fact that LLMs often hallucinate complete BS!
LLMs and generative “AI” rely on stolen artwork. Which is a net negative for society.
Well for me, I enjoy pair programming my own projects with offline models. I also bounce ideas off it to attempt to ground myself in some type of reality (some models are better for this than others… probably has risk of delusions of grandeur. Some models will just verbally suck you off which is annoying).
I built ansible tooling for deploying k3s kubernetes and Ceph-backed Proxmox clusters and VMs and containers and services. Utilized the help of LLMs to structure my playbooks and figure out how roles work.
I love learning new things and LLMs have a lot to offer in that regard. You have to watch out for the bullshit and independently look at other sources as well, but it’s a great starting point and I can sometimes have sone deep conversations around some topics.
Some people think you can use it as a replacement for therapy or to fight loneliness. Turns out, simply reading fiction is better.
https://neurosciencenews.com/reading-emapthy-loneliness-28972/
Cool article. Thanks for the link. As an older fellow, but a lifetime reader, mainly of sci-fi, I feel thankful that I’ve been doing something to offset the years of drug and alcohol abuse. :) I’m considering joining a book club, now.
Recently, though, I went through and read all the novels of Robert Rankin up to ‘The Mechanical Messiah and Other Marvels of the Modern Age’, which kind of broke my mind a bit - I DO NOT recommend it, there’s like 50 of them - and it’s taken me a year or so to feel like starting to read novels again. They’re wildly entertaining if you’re a fan of running gags and sheer insane premises, but I shouldn’t have taken them all at once.
It’s pretty cool how books are more than just fuel for imagination, no? But I second the idea of joining a book club, because not only do you get the cognitive effects of a book, but you get the social benefits of a club!
Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.
People here are generally anti-anything. That’s what echo chambers are for.
It’s much better to be a critical thinker than mindlessly accepting whatever BS from some grifter just because it’s “accepted wisdom” in a completely brainwashed society.
I’m gladly you’re one of the few non-brainwashed humans on the Earth. So special!
I am biased, I am having a ton of fun with LLMs and they are helping me achieve some personal goals. Do they use energy? Sure. Will new, more powerful technologies come along later that require even greater amounts of energy? I hope so one day. We need to find cleaner more abundant energy sources.
Sounds like most of Lemmy. Honestly sometimes I feel it’s worse than Reddit with the constant bashing on anything except Linux, Firefox, or - for some reason - Steam. Still glad I left Reddit though.
I can hate on Firefox if it’ll make you feel better.
I didn’t leave reddit, because I consider useful the subs I use (mostly technical stuff). And yes, you’re right about the constant bashing on anything out of the herd mentality.
Nuclear power seems to be one of those things that are anything but bashed here but instead gets treated with an almost worship-like reverence.
Take all that shit with a grain of salt. Such things don’t matter. Imagine getting riled up over a fucking web-browser. LOL.
or about an operating system, LOL! oh nevermind that it’s been uploading all your personal documents and pictures to a questionable cloud storage service without your given informed consent, for years, or that it recently started screenshotting the everydays of millions if not billions of users (among them businesses dealing with your data), to scrape together as much information as they possibly can
Go get 'em, Tiger!
