Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

simonwillison.net

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 615 posts

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#11

Post by vunderba »

fosterfriends wrote: post #5

My fav part of the writeup at the end: """ LLMs need better criticism # A lot of people absolutely hate this stuff. In some of the spaces I hang out (Mastodon, Bluesky, Lobste.rs, even Hacker News on occasion) even suggesting that “LLMs are useful” can be enough to kick off a huge fight. I like people who are skeptical of this stuff. The hype has been deafening for more than two years now, and there are enormous quan…

I agree, but I think my biggest issue with LLMs (and a lot of GenAI) is that they act as a massive accelerator for the WORST (and unfortunately most common) type of human - the lazy one.

The signal-to-noise ratio just goes completely out of control.

https://journal.everypixel.com/ai-image-statistics

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#12

Post by cess11 »

simonw wrote: post #8
throwanem wrote: post #7

> I’ve heard from sources I trust that both Google Gemini and Amazon Nova charge less than their energy costs for running inference... Then, several headings later: > I have it on good authority that neither Google Gemini nor Amazon Nova (two of the least expensive model providers) are running prompts at a loss. So...which is it?

Oh whoops! That's an embarrassing mistake, and I didn't realize I had that point twice. They're not running at a loss. I'll fix that.

If they are subsidised they can make a profit while still not making enough money to cover energy costs.

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#14

Post by comte7092 »

agentultra wrote: post #2

Don’t forget that 2024 was also a record year for new methane power plant projects. Some 200 new projects in the US alone and I’d wager most of them are funded directly by big tech for AI data centres. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/09/16/ai-boom-is-... This is definitely extending the runway of O&G at a crisis point in the climate disaster when we’re supposed to be reducing and shutting down these power…

Energy generation methods aren’t fungible.

Methane is favored in many cases because they can be quickly ramped up and down to handle momentary peaks in demand or spotty supply generated from renewables.

Without knowing more details about those projects it is difficult to make the claim that these plants have anything to do with increased demand due to LLMs, though if anything, they’d just add to base load demands and lead to slower decommissioning of old coal plants like we’ve seen with bitcoin mines.

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#16

Post by slimsag »

Animats wrote: post #10

> Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop That's an indication that most business-sized models won't need some giant data center. This is going to be a cheap technology most of the time. OpenAI is thus way overvalued.

Unless the best models themselves are costly/hard to produce, and there is not a company providing them to people free of charge AND for commercial use.

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#18

Post by kgwgk »

cess11 wrote: post #12
simonw wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh whoops! That's an embarrassing mistake, and I didn't realize I had that point twice. They're not running at a loss. I'll fix that.

If they are subsidised they can make a profit while still not making enough money to cover energy costs.

Subsidised by whom?

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#19

Post by agentultra »

api wrote: post #4
agentultra wrote: post #2

Don’t forget that 2024 was also a record year for new methane power plant projects. Some 200 new projects in the US alone and I’d wager most of them are funded directly by big tech for AI data centres. https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/09/16/ai-boom-is-... This is definitely extending the runway of O&G at a crisis point in the climate disaster when we’re supposed to be reducing and shutting down these power…

The only thing that will stop this is for battery storage to get cheap and available enough that it can cover for renewables. If we are still building gas turbines it means that hasn’t happened yet. AI is a red herring. If it wasn’t that it would be EV power demand. If it wasn’t that it would be reshoring of manufacturing. If it wasn’t that it would be population growth from immigration. If it wasn’t that it would be…

Methane has a shorter half-life than CO2 but is a far worse green house gas; retaining far more heat.

And delivering methane leaks like a sieve into the atmosphere from all parts of the process.

Sure it’s probably “better than coal,” but not by much. It’s a bit like comparing what’s worse: getting burned by fire or being drowned in acid.

Re: Things we learned about LLMs in 2024

#20

Post by shihab »

Animats wrote: post #10

> Some of those GPT-4 models run on my laptop That's an indication that most business-sized models won't need some giant data center. This is going to be a cheap technology most of the time. OpenAI is thus way overvalued.

The last OpenAI valuation I read about was 157 billion. I am struggling to understand what justifies this. To me, it feels like OpenAI is at best few months ahead of competitors in some areas. But even if I am underestimating the advantage, it's few years instead of few months, why does it matter? It's not like AI companies are going to enjoy the first-mover advantage internet giants had over the competition.
Post reply on HN