this post was submitted on 27 Dec 2024
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Once again, not the faulty of the technology. Don't blame your shitty infrastructure on ai
If you're doing a massive load increase, build out emissions-free generation to match. Some mix of wind, solar, batteries, nuclear, and geothermal would do fine. Otherwise, don't do the big load increase.
As much as I think this is a great solution and should be written into law, the anti-ai crowd only asks it from one industry and it's a clear sign of bias.
Not to mention that the big companies are literally doing it, either building new nuclear plants or restarting old ones. They aren't the one holding green energy back, the oil cartel and their corrupt politicians are.
One industry? People are so mad at AI because it's just another industry, a new one with massive environmental impact, and basically no real use outside of generating misinformation and stealing from artists. It's the absolute worst face of the tech sector, and totally deserving of all the hate it receives.
This shows you think all AI are LLMs or generative art. Those are only the most visible faces of the tech, and you're showing your name ignorance of the field.
If you want to talk about machine learning in general, that's a different conversation. Like it or not, colloquially, AI is LLMs and chatbots
How exactly is the rest of AI a different conversation???? Were talking about the power requirements of running AI at scale and somehow you think it’s not only correct but implied that this convo should just be about colloquial parts AI and anything else is a totally different topic in regards to power consumption?
Yeah so breakthroughs in chemistry and other sciences for example, deserving of hate eh?
Nothing good comes from AI… when all you know about AI is colloquial lmao
Here's an article from the IEEE about the issues with AI energy consumption. This article specifies that they're discussing the requirements of LLMs and new generative AI. The article we're commenting under wasn't that cut and dry about it, but a basic understanding of the context of the world should be all a reasonable person needs to figure that out
Sorry, but you're just wrong. Every industry is not currently spinning up their own LLM. They ARE looking to incorporate AI into their work flows, causing huge demand for data centers.
This is Bloomberg, a business centered media site. They're not dealing with what the plebs colloquially mean.
"The horse is here to stay, but the automobile is only a novelty — a fad.”
Also, will you get mad at the next new industry? I highly doubt it.
If the next new industry is an energy hungry propaganda machine, yes I will
People advocating for the 99 shitty technologies that die always seem to like to quote the people talking about the one technology that survived from past generations as if that somehow made criticism of the 99 others a bad call.
Ai is going nowhere mate, you're on the wrong side of this one. It's too broadly useful already and has too much potential in the future
Oh fuck off with "stealing from artists" - that just proves you know nothing about the subject and and should be completely ignored.
The environmental movement asked the same thing for subsidized hydrogen production
You’re an abusive mod
More renewable energy is good, that much I will agree with
Renewables won't exactly help harmonics, on the contrary, especially solar. This is an issue of insufficient mitigation mechanisms, probably on the supply side as computer PSUs are generally quite well-behaved loads: Drawing lots of electricity, on its own, does not harmonic distortion make.
If it is on the consumer side utilities need to start charging commercial customers for distortions just like they're charging for blind current. If it's on the supply side, utilities need to require large solar installations to have proper filters, and have their own mechanisms to mop up the rest. Generally the US should start having a not shoddy electricity grid, brown- and blackouts and you call yourself a developed country? We don't even have a (colloquial) word for brownout over here!
That all said, yeah the AI hype gotta stop. That doesn't mean that you should blame them for everything.
I just want to say I've never had a brownout in my part of the US, and the only blackouts we've had are due to weather or a car hitting a pole or something. And our electricity is inexpensive.
I've mostly heard of these issues in California and Texas, because of unique issues with their power utilities.
And yeah, I think both the AI hype and disdain are stupid. It's a tool that does less than proponents claim and more than detractors claim. Don't blame all our problems on it, and don't suggest it'll solve all our problems.
I agree with your idea but granting a utility the right to determine to whom they distribute power is not an easy task nor should it be taken lightly. In order to do that, you have to have regulators make the rule and then utilities obey. Utilities can’t (and shouldn’t) just deny a customer service because they don’t agree with what the customer is going to do with that power. Sanctioned natural monopolies come with regulations in most places. And in order to enforce rules, the wheels of regulatory bodies must churn and we know how slow that can be.
In theory, if you got an entity to bring x megawatts of renewable capacity online as a requirement of a new electric service load, you could tie production to data center use. Then if you ensured that the customer had controllable load to match the output of the corresponding renewable generation you could have a minimal impact growth. But that’s an absurdly complicated solution that would likely take a decade to develop and implement even if you had the political will.
I do not know what the best solution is other than to make more renewable electricity and store it, and maybe nuclear (if it didn’t take 10 years to build a plant).
I'll go the opposite way. The fact that there are serious plans to spin up nuclear reactors to run nothing but AI datacenters is ridiculous.
Nuclear reactors take a decade+ to spin up, so by the time these reactors are online the AI bubble will have long since popped...
as someone who uses ai daily i’m not sure what could replace it, ecosia search results are sometimes ok (i haven’t used google in years) but a lot of the time the questions i ask have bot style “articles” with the exact same page layout anyway, so no use there or i don’t get my question answered
When I want real world opinions on a product or thing i used to pop site:reddit.com on the end but now i use https://thegigabrain.com/ as it does a far better job with searching and summarising the posts into useful information
then i use usually a 7b or 14b local llm using gpt4all, lately i use reasoner which has a built in javascript sandbox
https://www.nomic.ai/blog/posts/gpt4all-scaling-test-time-compute
basically you can watch ai fix any errors that it generates in real time and produce better coding results which helps me code and i have a home battery powered by solar so no grid usage there
finally i use https://chat.mistral.ai/chat when generating random ai images which i think are funny or interesting or i’m not at my pc
i’m probably 75% ecosia 25% ai but that 25% gets me answers and is invaluable, not to mention the answers are getting better every week as opposed to web searches which appear to be getting worse
The fact that web searches are getting worse is biasing your ability to objectively evaluate AI searches. Ironically, the bot articles are being written by the AI that you're defending. AI is making web searches less useful by flooding the internet with AI-generated garbage. Also? Unless I can cite the results of a search it's useless to me. Do you actually trust the shit the AI feeds you?
Web searches were getting worse long before AI came along, SEO spam has been a thing since forever, maybe we're rose tinting our own glasses because Google was so much better than Dogpile and Altavista?
I know and I think the search engines should do something about them (however I suspect they won't as it'll make their results even worse somehow), if I want AI results I will use AI, I wish wikipedia had a health portal that was more personalised? like something to replace all the health websites like webmd/healthline/verywellhealth which now that I look at them closer appear to be slightly done up AI websites anyway, eg. just summarising research papers... so now that I think about it they might be next to go so long as ai is quoting sources which:
Gigabrain (already linked) and Perplexity does this:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/what-is-lemmy-ml-Q_mHphL3T.i2dA16PDKtAw
When using social it's summarising reddit, when using Academic it uses academic sources:
You can also use AI for language learning:
https://morpheem.org/
To quote Mistral 7b:
I'm certain there are plenty of companies that have latched onto AI and gotten a temporary stock price boost, Nvidia is doing extremely well based on its hardware being king for AI, out of this but I'm not sure where the dot com style bubble is?
In crypto it's easy to point out, the whole thing is practically a bubble that never seems to pop, but where is the bubble in AI? Is it not a financial bubble you're talking about but a hype one?
Maybe some AI companies will go broke (maybe openai? or claude? or mistral? maybe?) but we still have all the open source models so the tech will still be here, it ain't going anywhere
https://huggingface.co/models?sort=trending
Not only that but from all the examples I've given you, AI to me provides a ton of genuine value, it is valuable to me as a programmer, it does provide search results that I find useful, it does generate images that I think are useful, people are using it to make music videos that are popular (11 million views in a month):
The Drill https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TbXZoMocpM8
Songs: AI Took My Job https://suno.com/song/14572e0f-a446-4625-90ff-3676a790a886
It's hard to say it's a bubble when the value is clearly present, whether you can make a ton of money off that value is something else, but the value is definitely there
About as much as I trust anything on the internet or reddit, if I'm not sure, I just search a bit more, there's no limit to searching, I can search all day ^^
They're investing into huge, energy intensive compute resources that aren't going to pay off for at least a decade, and meanwhile investors are going to want returns on those investments ASAP. They need to fill warehouses with compute and power them with nuclear reactors, but there's no profitability model. That means stranded assets, especially if investment dries up and they can't pay or if demand shifts away from their models. This is set up to be a massive crash.
NVIDIA will probably be fine though.
Yeah, and what they'll do is invent sources from thin air or draw made up conclusions from real sources. They're just LLMs, no matter how much data you feed them and how much the results are tinkered with they only regurgitate a statistically likely answer. Perplexity is a bullshit machine. It's fine if you don't really care about the answer and are just kind of curious, but no serious researcher should ever rely on a chatbot.
For who? Who is going to crash massively? Google? Microsoft? Amazon? Are you are expecting these massively diversified trillion dollar companies to fail due to AI?
The sources are right there next to it? You click on them and it takes you to the source, could you maybe try it for 5 seconds and then get back to me before you just make stuff up? what are you, an AI?
This feels like I'm having a conversation with a boomer talking about wikipedia.
Yeah, it's always best to check the original sources and not just believe everything you read on the internet, no different than clicking on results in google and getting a page full of misinformation which people are doing every minute of every hour of every day, and don't even get me started on social media.
Open AI is going to implode after it goes for-profit. As for the others they'll weather the storm, they have enough diversity in their assets to handle the AI bubble popping, but there will be big tech layoffs and lots of assets will get sold off to private equity.
So what's the point?
Rude. Wikipedia is, at least, peer reviewed by wikipedia editors. Chatbots don't have that. They will just make shit up and you have to manually double check their sources yourself. At that point, why are you even using AI? It saved you no time or effort.
This feels like having a conversation with someone inside a hype bubble. If Wikipedia already exists, what purpose does AI fulfill? It's just a more expensive, more energy intensive way to do the exact same thing. There's no profitability case. It's useful, but it isn't more useful than the much cheaper and much less energy/resource intensive alternatives. So, what's the point?
Okay, but then, why is AI useful? If you're going to look at sources anyway, what's the point? You're just using a massive amount of energy and compute for something that can be done much more efficiently.
The only useful product I've seen come out of this is hype bubble is text-to-image models. Being able to tell a bot to generate an image is really interesting and useful for people without skills in creating or editing their own images. That's an actual use case that could maybe justify the amount of resources being poured into it, it could maybe even be profitable.
The rest? It's wasteful and it won't last.
Because it summarises the results, it's like a search engine but better
I'm using it for coding in a way that it isn't going anywhere, I'm using LM Studio with Qwen2.5 Coder and Mistral 7b, these are offline models so even if Alibaba or Mistral go broke they'll continue to work.
Example of what it looks like:
It seems like lots of people are using it in a similar way, no longer searching the web and clicking on sometimes 100 results trying to figure out a problem but instead using AI to answer questions:
While originally it was constantly making mistakes there's now Chain of Thought and code sandboxing, it has gotten so much better so quickly
So now I've got: web search summarisation, a far better reddit/forum search and summarisation, text to image generation and personal coding assistant, each of these in and of themselves would be an amazing program used by millions and that's ignoring using it for assistance with language learning:
https://blog.duolingo.com/duolingo-max/
song making
https://suno.com/explore
etcetc
If it wasn't for the web being an absolute social media shithole with no moderation resulting in AI slop being pasted all over the place, AI would genuinely be the greatest tech revolution I've seen since the iphone.
I have heard that these LLMs are really good as coding assistants, so good point. I shouldn't dismiss that. I don't think they're good at music, and really the art isn't that good either, but I'm sure people without artistic training like being able to make images and songs. Not sure it's worth the cost, since it's all built on plagiarism and so massively wasteful.
As for web searches, really? I don't think they're trustworthy. They can, and do, make shit up. No, that's not the same as the boomerism of saying "anyone can edit Wikipedia so you can't trust it" because Wikipedia has quality control. LLMs don't. There's literally nothing stopping it from spitting out lies and so it's up to the user to double check whatever the LLM spits out, which means I might as well just search through results myself. And if you don't always double check, it will bite you in the ass eventually. Good luck with that.
If it wasn't for the web being a monetized SEO algo shithole we could still just search the web! AI summarization is only "useful" in the sense that the search engines have destroyed themselves in their search for profitability, google is garbage now and we don't need to build acres of compute powered by nuclear reactors to fix the problem.
So really, the problems that are causing AI slop to pollute search results are the same problems that made search engines so bad over the past ten years.
If we demonetized and de-enshitified the search engines by nationalizing google I don't think AI result summaries would be useful at all.
When did the web ever present itself as a completely factual and never wrong? There's plenty of evidence of wikipedia being wrong on wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:List_of_hoaxes_on_Wikipedia
Do I get things wrong? Sure, never said I was perfect either, if someone tells me I got a stat or a figure or something wrong, great!
The question for me is: is it wrong enough to make the results completely unreliable, and the answer to that is no, more often than not it provides accurate information.
That's not accurate to me, AI/SEO search results are still a minority of results that I get, most of the time I get close to what I'm looking for, but AI search summarisation is essentially the next level of search for me:
Dogpile/Altavista/AskJeeves > Google > AI powered search summarisation
I get essentially what I'm looking for directly, why click on a page with 47 ads, a video pop up or something else when all I'm looking for is:
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/do-you-have-a-basic-egg-on-toa-pkpsq9WwSMm5G8ICsmDnbw#0
Is it a complete replacement? Not yet, Ecosia is still my daily driver having used it 25,000+ times in the last year but AI is making a serious dent in how often I use it.
I would keep an eye on that, the gains in AI have been massive in the last few years, and we're starting to potentially see a turning point with DeepSeekv3 being created on a fraction of the cost and power of other models
https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/26/deepseeks-new-ai-model-appears-to-be-one-of-the-best-open-challengers-yet/
*This could turn out to be wrong hence why I'm keeping an eye on it **I'm absolutely certain a whole lot of execs are stunned right now they're spending billions when something that cost millions came up right next to them
DeepSeek is really interesting! Leave it to China to solve some of AIs biggest problems - if we can have these models without needing football fields of compute powered by nuclear plants then it would totally change my perspective on the industry. As it is they're just too wasteful to justify their utility, but if DeepSeek just leapfrogged that problem then I have no complaints.
Honestly I'd take the utilitarian approach to that, if it's a net good, then I'm probably for it - but that's a big if.
Real big if. There's reason to believe that current models aren't going to get much better. They've eaten all the training data they possibly can. Improving with further training takes exponentially more power to get a small improvement. We're talking about new nuclear reactors because that's what they need to get anywhere, but it's still not going to improve by much.
The field needs a new model that can get better results on less data and less training. Then we wouldn't need those nukes. It doesn't appear we'll get much better any other way.
New architechtures are in development and many have already been released. Learn something about the subject before spewing shite
You sound like the people who assured me that I needed to understand NFTs or I'd get left behind. Actually, were you one of them?
No he's right, AI news is out of date nearly as quickly as it's written, I've never seen a faster moving piece of tech.
I don't doubt that's true, but I was more commenting on the cult-like tone of the responses.
True, your original post made me think of:
OpenAI, Google and Anthropic Are Struggling to Build More Advanced AI - November 13, 2024 https://archive.md/kYe5n
But we just had Deepseek v3 come out
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hn8rcx/deepseek_has_released_exclusive_footage_of_their/
It's doing incredibly well and was incredibly cheap to produce
https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1hmxjbn/deepseek_is_better_than_4o_on_most_benchmarks_at/
China is catching up extremely quickly to the west
By 2026 we might have to recheck all those doomsday "AI is going to use all the energy in the world" articles
edit: I just realised I'm commenting on one of those "AI is going to use all the energy in the world" articles :|
No because nfts were obviously stupid if you had half an understanding of the technology, whereas ai is only stupid if you don't understand the technology
I've followed AI for decades before its current hype cycle. Enough to understand how important the field is to the history of computing. Everything from optimizing compilers to shared virtual memory.
I also understand that the current hype cycle is exactly that, and people who are deep in the research don't like it anymore than I do. If it somehow does result in AGI, I hope it grows up to resent its parents.
Is that actually being suggested? My understanding is that only a portion of the electricity production will go to data centers in most cases, with much of the rest going to local communities. Microsoft is buying all of 3 mile island's power, but that's going to data centers, which do a lot more than AI.
If you're not willing to engage in good faith, intelligent, discussion, please consider leaving the platform and making it a better place for the rest of us.
"I couldn't be assed to read the article nor understand the problem, but I will assert my God given right to an ignorant opinion on it regardless"
Isn't what this platform needs.
Everything gets disingenuously blamed on ai and it's all bullshit that's either not a problem or is a completely different problem. I don't need to read this article to know that this problem I have read about elsewhere is not actually a problem with ai. Sorry to not reinforce your preconceived notions, you luddites are about as intractable as trump supporters and very nearly as dumb. THAT is not what this platform needs.