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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#161

Post by travisgriggs »

> As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).

Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable.

Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Suddenly with a new trixie build and who knows what else has changed, I just could not get my little client to open the HCI socket. In about 10 minutes prompt dueling between GPT and Claude, I was able to learn all about rfkill and get to the bottom of things. I’ve worked with Linux for 20+ years, and somehow had missed learning about rfkill in the mix.

I was happy and saddened. I would not have k own where to turn. SO doesn’t get near the traffic it used to and is so bifurcated and policed I don’t even try anymore. I never know whether to look for a mailing list, a forum, a discord, a channel, the newsgroups have all long died away. There is no solidly written chapter in a canonically accepted manual written by tech writers on all things Bluetooth for the Linux Kernel packaged with raspbian. And to pile on, my attention span driven by a constant diet of engagement, makes it harder to have the patience.

It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#162

Post by lukeschlather »

buellerbueller wrote: post #87
simonw wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about here: > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...] > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Querétaro sites used 40 million litres of water, it added. > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the numbers are huge. That's not cr…

It's a lot of water for AI waifus and videos of Trump shitbombing people who dare oppose him.

It's not a lot of water for AI weather modeling to ensure the soybean crops throughout the country are adequately watered and maximize yield.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#163

Post by lkey »

the__alchemist wrote: post #97
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…

| Drop the politics

Politics is the set of activities that are associated with making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations among individuals, such as the distribution of status or resources.

Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.

Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in their preferred form.

The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a privilege.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#164

Post by Der_Einzige »

fmbb wrote: post #62
Aransentin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Depends on what the datacenters are used for. AI has no utility. Almonds make marzipan.

Activated almonds create funko pops. I’d still take the data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that almonds causes.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#165

Post by danielbln »

Etherlord87 wrote: post #116
jstanley wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough utility? And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else, it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.

If only millions of people suffering from lack of water knew this.

Would we be sending that water to those millions of people instead?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#166

Post by rekrsiv »

IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection pressure.

Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower scale than we are and needs less energy to achieve anything. Coincidentally, our own progress has also been tied to the rate of shrinking of our toys.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#167

Post by stavros »

simonw wrote: post #80
fmbb wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends on what the datacenters are used for. AI has no utility. Almonds make marzipan.

"AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the tail end of 2025.

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#168

Post by simonw »

belter wrote: post #159
simonw wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from that article: > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021). Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture. USGS 2015 report: https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has irrigation at 118 billion gallons per day - that's 43,070 billion gallons per year. 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than half a percentage p…

I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing irrigation water with data-center water usage... They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to misleading conclusions on the impact.

That's a really good point - you're right, comparing data center usage to potable water usage by towns is a different and more valid comparison than comparing with water for irrigation.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#169

Post by samuelknight »

friendzis wrote: post #99
IgorPartola wrote: post #21

It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot manufacture a human level neuron to be s…

> We would need a new hardware paradigm. It's not even that. The architecture(s) behind LLMs are nowhere near close that of a brain. The brain has multiple entry-points for different signals and uses different signaling across different parts. A brain of a rodent is much more complex than LLMs are.

LLM 'neurons' are not single input/single output functions. Most 'neurons' are Mat-Vec computations that combine the products of dozens or hundreds of prior weights.

In our lane the only important question to ask is, "Of what value are the tokens these models output?" not "How closely can we emulate an organic bran?"

Regarding the article, I disagree with the thesis that AGI research is a waste. AGI is the moonshot goal. It's what motivated the fairly expensive experiment that produced the GPT models, and we can look at all sorts of other hairbrained goals that ended up making revolutionary changes.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#170

Post by HPsquared »

efsavage wrote: post #127
simonw wrote: post #12

Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument. At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article) sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule. Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2 emissions etc are fine - but if you com…

The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable to our initial position whatever that is. Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that more people th…

Put that way, any electricity usage will have some "water usage" as power plants turn up their output (and the cooling pumps) slightly. And that's not even mentioning hydroelectric plants!
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