this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2024
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Big brain tech dude got yet another clueless take over at HackerNews etc? Here's the place to vent. Orange site, VC foolishness, all welcome.
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there’s this type of reply guy on fedi lately who does the “well actually querying LLMs only happens in bursts and training is much more efficient than you’d think and nvidia says their gpus are energy-efficient” thing whenever the topic comes up
and meanwhile a bunch of major companies have violated their climate pledges and say it’s due to AI, they’re planning power plants specifically for data centers expanded for the push into AI, and large GPUs are notoriously the part of a computer that consumes the most power and emits a ton of heat (which notoriously has to be cooled in a way that wastes and pollutes a fuckton of clean water)
but the companies don’t publish smoking gun energy usage statistics on LLMs and generative AI specifically so who can say
On one hand, yes let's get annoyed at companies for using alot of energy. On the other hand, we have known our energy needs will be exponential for decades yet we haven't tackled the issue. We still burn fossil fuels, despite having the ability to not do that.
Being angry at companies for building a new technology yet not being angry at the government and NIMBY fuckwads is a little... Backwards imo.
I don’t think any of the reply guys I’m talking about work for the government, but I am pretty fucking angry that a lack of regulation and government oversight allows the companies I mentioned to flood the market with worthless, polluting grifttech they say needs dedicated power plants to scale to meet a fictional level of demand
it’d be nice if anyone was seriously considering regulation that’d stop these companies from doing stupid harmful shit. unfortunately they’re not (and the ability of the US government to effectively regulate any industry at all has just been effectively ended), so I don’t really have anything to write about in that area.
I mean there's loads of industries that produce shit no one wants for needs. My confusion comes from why people are seething at LLMs. They are useful, they are getting more intelligent and can actually help people.
But there are entire businesses that exist to purely make shit on one side of the planet to ship to the other side of the planet. Billions of tons of plastic "bric a brac" get sold every year, none of it needs to exist but doesn't get the same attention or hate. And that actively produces harmful pollution.