31–40 of 90 posts
Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
Wasn't crypto supposed to cause this same energy apocalypse? Does AI even use more energy than crypto ever did? Doubtful. Besides, we're projected to ingest all of humanity's written knowledge by 2026, and after that there will be a cliff in power consumption, we will mostly switch to inference on purpose built hardware, which is vastly more efficient.
What I’d love to see is a rundown of new efficiencies in generative AI. With things like quantization and specialized transformer hardware, the costs will hopefully be less shocking in the future. And fwiw, I don’t find the article’s stats very shocking anyway. At least it’s a net win type of game, whereas the previous environmental bugbear, PoW crypto, was entirely premised on net-energy loss.
What I’d love to see is a rundown of new efficiencies in generative AI. With things like quantization and specialized transformer hardware, the costs will hopefully be less shocking in the future. And fwiw, I don’t find the article’s stats very shocking anyway. At least it’s a net win type of game, whereas the previous environmental bugbear, PoW crypto, was entirely premised on net-energy loss.
All optimizations inevitably end up just being funneled into larger and larger models. The issue with AI is its seemingly endless ability to scale in size for marginal gains in model performance (log(n) scaling essentially).
Well of course if you're trying to beat the SOTA, bigger sizes allow for better models, but not everyone is trying to use or train the latest SOTA model, maybe llama-3 8b is perfect for what you need to do and having better optimizations to run it locally is gold.
Now the problem is that if someone puts a $10/month price on the AI functionality, they will stop paying for it because it doesn't really have a $10/month ROI.
Literally every AI thing I've seen people use has got an interest taper off way before the free trial even ends.
The constraining factor will prevent an energy apocalypse: It doesn't materially improve most people's lives at all.
> A similar trend will likely guide the use of generative AI as a whole, with the energy invested in AI servers tracking the economic utility society as a whole sees from the technology.
This comparison is inappropriate. Cryptocurrency was and is mainly an object of speculation, not of intrinsic economic value. I'm contrast, AI has clearly a lot of economic value, and that value increases with time, since it gets better with time.
Moreover, the rate of improvement over the last few years have been staggering. Things that seemed far out of reach science fiction technology ten years ago are now unremarkable reality. So there are solid empirical grounds to expect that progress in the coming 10 years will be transformative as well. Nothing like that was or is the case for cryptocurrency.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Are environmental externalities accounted for? How do we accurately measure the 'benefit' of something when it's still largely speculative (ie. AI is not providing as much value RIGHT NOW, but we think it will in the future). Economic problems are rarely just economic problems, and saying that it will resolve itself in the long term is dismissive and offers no value to the discussion.
The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.
If we have a coal plant and add one wind farm we still have one coal plant.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The environmental externality of new energy in the US is likely ~0, potentially even net positive, because approximately all new energy in the US is renewable, and displacement effects are likely to dominate the small-single-digit percentage of nonrenewables and the marginal environmental cost of the renewables themselves.
Even if that's true, why would we only price in the externalities of new energy? If we have a coal plant and add one wind farm we still have one coal plant.