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

I've never been so conflicted about a technology

marcjenkins.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 125 posts

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#41

Post by jebarker »

staunton wrote: post #33
jebarker wrote: post #19

> “If you’re going to use generative tools powered by large language models, don’t pretend you don’t know how your sausage is made.” This isn't a very hopeful quote given how many people continue to eat sausages even though we all know how sausages are made.

> we all know how sausages are made. I'm doubtful. There's a few documentaries showing the process and I've had people tell me multiple times that they were genuinely shocked by it. I'm assuming those people "knew" and it's just that knowing "it's all the waste at the butcher getting stuffed into guts" is not quite the same as seeing it first hand.

I wasn't even really thinking of the actual sausage stuffing process so much as how the meat gets to the butcher (which is really a meat grinding factory in most cases) in the first place.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#42

Post by [deleted] »

JKCalhoun wrote: post #22

> Firstly, there’s the environmental impact. Surely, like everything else in tech, this too shall pass. I expect power requirements to fall away since there is no doubt strong incentives to do so. > My naive optimism led me to believe that technology would help us fight climate change. Yeah, proceeding full steam ahead with planet destruction and praying tech will save us is kind of naive. You're not alone though. >…

[deleted]

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#45

Post by kragen »

lucianbr wrote: post #26
roywiggins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal impact of AI on global climate probably rounds down to zero, or at least is not the thing driving us over the cliff: > Global energy consumption in 2023 was around 500,000 GWh per day. That means that ChatGPT’s global 3GWh per day is using 0.0006% of Earth’s energy demand. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

How much of that 500 TWh would disappear if you round to zero everything that consumes 3GWh per day or less? And keep in mind you are calculating for a single app (ChatGPT), nor for an entire industry or tech. Don't look at "civil aviation" but at each airline in particular. I suspect nearly all of it. You framed it such that it appears insignificant, but with this framing nothing is significant.

ChatGPT is probably the majority of LLM use today, so this is not the equivalent of claiming that neither your car nor mine nor anybody else's uses more than 3GWh per day and therefore cars don't use a significant amount of energy collectively.

Also, though this is not really relevant to your major incorrect point, airlines aren't part of civil aviation.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#46

Post by [deleted] »

vaylian wrote: post #10
bitpush wrote: post #2

Disappointed with the article, especially because it uses "think of the planet" as a weak argument against this technology. > Firstly, there’s the environmental impact Their own blog contributes to climate crisis they are now crying about. We can argue someone in a developing country writing a similar article saying "all these self publishing technologists are making climate crisis worse" and it'll have a stronger po…

[flagged]

[deleted]

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#48

Post by roywiggins »

lucianbr wrote: post #26
roywiggins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal impact of AI on global climate probably rounds down to zero, or at least is not the thing driving us over the cliff: > Global energy consumption in 2023 was around 500,000 GWh per day. That means that ChatGPT’s global 3GWh per day is using 0.0006% of Earth’s energy demand. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

How much of that 500 TWh would disappear if you round to zero everything that consumes 3GWh per day or less? And keep in mind you are calculating for a single app (ChatGPT), nor for an entire industry or tech. Don't look at "civil aviation" but at each airline in particular. I suspect nearly all of it. You framed it such that it appears insignificant, but with this framing nothing is significant.

I guess I'd frame it another way: how many LLM conversations a month would you have to have to increase your energy consumption by 1% vs how many more hot showers

if you are actually worried about your ChatGPT energy usage, skip a hot shower or spend a few hours less playing Cyberpunk 2077 and a few more hours reading an old book.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#49

Post by pixl97 »

BugsJustFindMe wrote: post #30
JKCalhoun wrote: post #22

> Firstly, there’s the environmental impact. Surely, like everything else in tech, this too shall pass. I expect power requirements to fall away since there is no doubt strong incentives to do so. > My naive optimism led me to believe that technology would help us fight climate change. Yeah, proceeding full steam ahead with planet destruction and praying tech will save us is kind of naive. You're not alone though. >…

> I expect power requirements to fall away This sounds extremely naive to my ears. Performance demands currently outpace resource utilization reductions and it's not clear that we're at the point where that will change soon. Also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox > > There are also ethical concerns regarding the methods used to obtain data for training AI models. > This one hasn't registered as problemati…

You mean speeding up the destruction of the internet and media?

The problem is it was falling apart before generative AI. This AI has just hastened its demise.

Re: I've never been so conflicted about a technology

#50

Post by zellyn »

lucianbr wrote: post #26
roywiggins wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The marginal impact of AI on global climate probably rounds down to zero, or at least is not the thing driving us over the cliff: > Global energy consumption in 2023 was around 500,000 GWh per day. That means that ChatGPT’s global 3GWh per day is using 0.0006% of Earth’s energy demand. https://andymasley.substack.com/p/a-cheat-sheet-for-conversa...

How much of that 500 TWh would disappear if you round to zero everything that consumes 3GWh per day or less? And keep in mind you are calculating for a single app (ChatGPT), nor for an entire industry or tech. Don't look at "civil aviation" but at each airline in particular. I suspect nearly all of it. You framed it such that it appears insignificant, but with this framing nothing is significant.

I definitely think breaking out ChatGPT on its own is too fine-grained. At the very least, one should lump all LLM training and use, or perhaps all deep learning training and use together.

I suspect at a "sensible" breakdown (trying to avoid the "How long is my coastline?" problem), which is presumably something akin to Zipfian, the main uses will actually account for most energy usage.

If anyone can find a breakdown at the level of granularity that "all deep learning" would make sense, let me know: so far my Googling has led primarily to either detailed breakdowns of energy _sources_, or high-level breakdowns of use at the level of "industry", "agriculture", or "residential use".

Post reply on HN