- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
- cross-posted to:
- technology@beehaw.org
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,”
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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.
That’s part of why they installed Donald Trump as the dictator of the United States. The other is the network states.
The spice must flow
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. There were plenty of promising lines of research still going on.
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.
The perceptron was created in 1957 and a physical model was built a year later
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”.
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 leaps 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?
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.
Copilot, ChatGPT, pretty much all of them.
Smarter how? Synthetic benchmarks?
Because I’ve heard the opposite from users and bloggers.
Advanced Reasoning models came out like 4 months ago lol
Advanced reasoning? Having LLM talk to itself?
Historically “AI” still doesn’t exist.
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.
Does the article answer the question of what is the footprint of a prompt?
Basically nothing worth getting angry about
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.
Launch cost is astronomical.
Maintenance access is horrible.
Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.
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.
also, you can make computers much more cheap and reliable, more maintainable and much much faster, if you protect them from space radiation by operating them down here, under the protection of earth’s atmosphere.
very stupid. One of the most difficult things in space is cooling stuff. Sending up a bunch of space heaters in a box (almost all of the energy pumped into a computer is turned into heat. The actual computatiion takes next to nothing in comparison) is definitely not a good idea. Definitely not one thought up by a technical person.
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.
Oh, I have zero expectation of an actual positive outcome. I don’t think the tech-bros read. Or think ahead.
How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.
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.
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?
there’s lots of handwavy things. They even said they “discovered new physics” to explain some disappointing (perfectly predictable, by other established nuclear physicists) results. “Oh the physics equation was wrong, we just need to make everything 25% bigger”.
Also, the emitted radiation levels will be insane once it’s scaled up
The matrix is getting more and more real every day
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?
What stone did you live under? The huge power consumption of crypto was often debated. You just don’t hear too much about it because people don’t really talk about crypto much anymore. Now it’s mostly just people pro crypto who discuss it. And obviously they tend to talk leas about the downsides.
Eh, that enormous energy consumption hasn’t change, y’know. For Bitcoin, for example, the basic concept is still that ALL wallets have to process ALL transactions, which scales as well as studfing a walrus in a mini Cooper. Bitcoin is extremely energy inefficient and is simply not a good replacement for transactions for the entire world.
Same goes for all other block chain technologies, they’re fundamentally flawed and won’t ever be good. If you want a good alternative to visa and MasterCard, you’ll need something fundamentally different from blockchain tech.
… Oh, so so the terawatts of power wasted is no longer a problem because people don’t really speak of it anymore and cryptobros tried to debate it.
If I’m living under a stone, you’re straight up stoned.
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.
That’s because one has all the big tech companies madly rushing to implement it everywhere, while the other even Ubisoft has abandoned and is more or less stuck to their own cult
Are you getting triggered yet?
What do you think this is, 2016 Tumblr?
This? Hipster 4chan from everything I’ve seen. Altought nowadays 4chan tends to be less hateful/extreme, especially when it comes to calls for genocide/killings of Jews
That’s not true if you were to use off-chain transactions (i.e. lightning network)
“That’s not true”
“But not true only if you use non-mainstream transaction method that was not part of the original design and is only supported by selected cryptos, meaning not universal”
K
I mean, don’t get me wrong, it’s nice that things are improving, but it’s safe to say that things will improve for AI too (energy-wise), hella lot of people now working on optimization and it looks very promising, even by just splitting large models into many smaller ones by topic
I just wanted to clarify the confusion that was in my head for a moment after going after the truth and fact checking. If I buy a pizza with Bitcoin and Lightning Network (which is the only one in use at most legal places), it’s not like I’m using 1600 kWh… The original message is misleading in that regard… Practical and concrete reality are different. But theoretical, if that pizza wanted a normal transaction it would use such amount of energy and take days (that’s why they wouldn’t use that)… So… There’s that.
Anyway, the dichotomy ‘AI or Crypto’ is false. I am not taking sides. But you do you, enjoy.
You don’t hear so much about it because it has faded a bit into the background and crypto bros work hard spreading misinformation about how awesome Bitcoin is.
Technically, blockchain tech is interesting, bit nothing more than that. Blockchain technology is fundamentally flawed. Requiring everyone to confirm the same transactions by having everyone make the same CPU / GPU / memory intensive calculations is just dumb and it won’t scale to anything that could sustain the daily transactions of even a single small country, let alone the world.
At least AI has a whole lot of pieces that are fundamentally “useful”. As it currently stands, AI will need completely new concepts and technologies to be able to grow in capabilities and shrink in power requirements, but at least the prices that are there are reasonably useful.
Blockchain technology is fundamentally flawed for just about any application at all.
Having said all that, fuck AI companies. AI could be a great new tool for humanity but instead we hacet all sorts of shitty assistants being shoved down our throats. Oh, and AI revenge porn, that too
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.
I have both heard and said that crypto uses a lot of energy on Lemmy.
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Partly, yep. Seems like every time I try to pin down an AI on a detail of a question worth asking - a math question, or a date in history, it’ll confidently reply with the first answer it finds … right or wrong.
I don’t think accuracy is an issue either. I’ve been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It’s really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other.
The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.
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
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
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.
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.
Do you disagree that AI presents an existential threat to our current way of life, and that a new way of life may be worse, and that we should therefore plan ahead before plunging in?
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.
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.
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.
Plastics are great, what are you smoking, plastics?
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?
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.
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!
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 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.
I can hate on Firefox if it’ll make you feel better.
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.
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.
