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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

#301

Post by mikemarsh »

hitarpetar wrote: post #282
ACCount37 wrote: post #275

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can't look at the "real weather" though. You can only look at the outputs. That's the constraint. Good luck and have fun. A human brain is a big pile of jellied meat spread. An LLM is a big pile of weights strung together by matrix math. Neither looks "intelligent". Neither is interpretable. The most reliable way we have to compare the two is by comparing the outputs. You can't drill a hole in one of those and se…

there is no "real weather". the rain is the weather. the map is not the territory. these are very simple concepts, idk why we need to reevaluate them because we all of a sudden got really good at text synthesis

Everyone's a practical empiricist until our cherished science fiction worldview is called into question, then all of a sudden it's radical skepticism and "How can anyone really know anything, man?"

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#302

Post by simonw »

swyx wrote: post #290
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…

> data centers often use potable drinking water hmm why exactly? mineral content?

Yeah I think it's to avoid mineral buildup on the cooling equipment which would then need to be replaced more often.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#303

Post by cruffle_duffle »

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 went down that “water use” rabbit hole a month ago and basically… it’s just a bunch of circular reporting that was based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they claimed “500ml for 10-50 responses”. In 2024, Washington Post published an article that took their claim and said “519 milliliters per email”[2] but didn’t source that from the original paper… that “shocking headline” took off and got widely circulated and cited directly, treating the WaPo calculation as if it were the original research finding. Then tech blogs and advocacy sites ran with it even harder, citing each other instead of any actual research[3].

If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with the difficulty of estimating water use. It’s not public data—in fact it’s usually a closely held trade secret, plus it’s got all kinds of other issues like you don’t know where the training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about these limitations in the actual paper.

Basically, it’s urban legend at this point. When OpenAI’s CEO later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that’s roughly 100x less than the viral claims.

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3] https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#304

Post by netdevphoenix »

How refreshing to see an AI realistic view on HN these days! As the author said, no one is claiming transformer tech useless, the issue is the relentless drive to claim loudly that transformers will lead to AGI in the next few years and solve all existing problems and that it is worth the current negative damage to society and the environment.

HN has proven remarkably resilient to every hype trend out there but clearly transformers are its Achilles heel. That or/and massive transformer astroturfing

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#305

Post by lkjdsklf »

themanmaran wrote: post #281
mlhpdx wrote: post #273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it goes through the data center?

Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Just because it doesn’t leave the cycle doesn’t mean it’s not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places drier, that means it’s less distributed

That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the water calculation comes from power generation (which uses a ton) and is non-potable water.

The potable water consumed is not zero, but it’s like 15% or something

The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes from fossil fuels

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#306

Post by simonw »

thewebguyd wrote: post #268
dimitrios1 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> sound scary when presented without context It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic, stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage at…

And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit to society, outside of maybe research cases. The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the largest expense). It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless so…

You appear to be arguing against using technology to boost human efficiency on a forum full of software engineers who've dedicated their careers to building software that makes humans more efficient.

If we aren't doing that then why are we building software?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#307

Post by bob1029 »

dotnet00 wrote: post #92
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…

Exactly why I cringe so hard when AI-bros make arguments equating AI neurons to biological neurons.

There are some tradeoffs in the other direction. Digital neurons can have advantages that biological neurons do not.

For example, if biology had a "choice" I am fairly confident that it would have elected to not have leaky charge carriers or relatively high latency between elements. Roughly 20% of our brain exists simply to slow down and compensate for the other 80%.

I don't know that eliminating these caveats is sufficient to overcome all the downsides, but I also don't think we've tried very hard to build experiments that directly target this kind of thinking. Most of our digital neurons today are of an extremely reductive variety. At a minimum, I think we need recurrence over a time domain. The current paradigm (GPU-bound) is highly allergic to a causal flow of events over time (i.e., branching control flows).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#308

Post by energy123 »

mikemarsh wrote: post #149

The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how hormones influence mood ultimately influencing…

Bundling up consciousness with intelligence is a big assumption, as is the assumption that panpsychism is incorrect. You may be right on both counts, but you can't just make those two assumptions as a foregone conclusion.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#309

Post by jgilias »

wilkommen wrote: post #177
travisgriggs wrote: post #161

> 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. Sud…

In the short term, it may be unrealistic (as you illustrate in your story) to try to successfully navigate the increasingly fragmented, fragile, and overly complex technological world we have created without genAI's assistance. But in the medium to long term, I have a hard time seeing how a world that's so complex that we can't navigate it without genAI can survive. Someday our cars will once again have to be simple…

I do agree with the fragility argument. Though if/when the shock comes, I doubt we’ll be anywhere near being able to build cars. Especially taking into account that all the easily accessible ore has long been mined and oxidized away.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#310

Post by asdfman123 »

But it's a boon to gathering investment capital and talent.

Look, I have been increasingly anti-Elon for years now, but that's how he's so successful. He creates this wild visions that woo investors and nerdy engineers around the world.

That's the whole point. If his pitch was "we can create better chat bots" no one would care.

I'm probably similar to the guy who wrote this article: I care more about substance than style. That doesn't get you ahead in this world, though. Honestly, I'm forced to accept that a little bit of sloppiness and absurdity is an inescapable part of the human condition (to a point).

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