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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

#391

Post by quickthrowman »

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 did some napkin math on data center water usage for a 500MW data center in the Columbia River valley.

It uses as much water per year as 200 acres of alfalfa in California’s Central Valley. There are around 1M acres of alfalfa growing in California.

2.5MW of data center capacity is roughly equal to 1 acre of irrigated alfalfa in water usage. If you’re pulling fossil aquifer water, open loop evaporative cooling may not be the best idea, but there are plenty of places east of 100 degrees west in the US that have virtually ‘unlimited’ water where cooling towers are a great idea since they almost double the COP of a chilled water system.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#392

Post by skywhopper »

mofeien wrote: post #28

> 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). > LLMs-as-AGI fail on all three fronts. The computational profligacy of LLMs-as-AGI is dissatisfying, and the exploitation of data workers and the environment unacceptable. It's a bit unsatisfying how the last paragraph only argues…

They are not “correct” most of the time in my experience. I assumed the author left that “proof” out because it was obvious.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#393

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ben_w wrote: post #384
gishh wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I appreciate that you feel this way, it’ll never happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop. For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a daily basis.

Beef is not the only meat. Chicken is much less water intensive.

From the animal welfare perspective, there's much more suffering involved in producing a pound of chicken than a pound of beef.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#394

Post by BeFlatXIII »

dimitrios1 wrote: post #41
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…

> 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…

Seems the problem is the revealed preference of the normies, rather than the technology itself.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#395

Post by Marha01 »

jimbokun wrote: post #356
jillesvangurp wrote: post #60

We should do things because they are hard, not because they are cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this stuff on a phone and it isn't terribl…

In addition to being hard, we should ask if something is useful or if the benefits outweigh the harms. It's hard to see benefits from AI systems, AGI or otherwise. It doesn't seem to produce anything that improves human happiness or general well being.

I think you just lack imagination. I can imagine a lot of benefits of AGI or near-AGI systems.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#396

Post by rao-v »

derektank wrote: post #238
abathur wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture feeds people, Simon. It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential. If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without. The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were us…

The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products. We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions…

I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the food supply and in California consume more water than the entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water).

Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters and use it to improve water infrastructure all around. Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only a short term issue because we've forgotten how to modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes in demand.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#397

Post by dontlaugh »

grokgrok wrote: post #247
eucyclos wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are politics and there are Politics, and I don't think the two of you are using the same definition. 'Making decisions in groups' does not require 'oversimplifying issues for the sake of tribal cohesion or loyalty'. It is a distressingly common occurrence that complex problems are oversimplified because political effectiveness requires appealing to a broader audience. We'd all be better off if more people withh…

The negatively coded, tribal/political speech can be referred to as 'Polemic' which stems from 'warlike' expression.

And polemic is an entirely legitimate form of political action.

Would you rather starve or never lie about those that would starve you?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#398

Post by kalkin »

mikemarsh wrote: post #253
kalkin wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Conflating consciousness and intelligence is going to hopelessly confuse any attempt to understand if or when a machine might achieve either. (I think there's no reasonable definition of intelligence under which LLMs don't possess some, setting aside arguments about quantity. Whether they have or in principle could have any form of consciousness is much more mysterious -- how would we tell?)

Defining machine consciousness is indeed mysterious, at the end of the day it ultimately depends on how much faith one puts in science fiction rather than an objective measure.

Seems like a philosophy question, with maybe some input from neuroscience and ML interpretability. I'm not sure what faith in science fiction has to do with it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#399

Post by cruffle_duffle »

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…

“And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.”

I’ve always thought about nature didn’t evolve to use electricity as its primary means of energy. Instead it uses chemistry. It’s quite curious, really.

Like a tiny insect is chemistry powered. It doesn’t need to recharge batteries, it needs to eat and breathe oxygen.

What if our computers started to use biology and chemistry as their primary energy source?

Or will it be the case that in the end using electricity as the primary energy source is more efficient for “human brain scale computation”, it’s just that nature didn’t evolve that way…

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#400

Post by throwup238 »

derektank wrote: post #238
abathur wrote: post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agriculture feeds people, Simon. It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that water, but a significant fraction of that activity is effectively essential. If you're going to minimize people's concern like this, at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live without. The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2... suggests we were us…

The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle products. We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make purchasing decisions…

> We could feed the world with far less water consumption if we opted not to eat meat.

If you look at the data for animals, that’s not really true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is that the vast majority of water used for animals is “green water” used for animal feed - that’s rainwater that isn’t captured but goes into the soil. Most of the plants used for animal feed don’t use irrigation agriculture so we’d be saving very little on water consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our water consumption would even get a lot worse because we’d have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated farmland and we’d lose the productivity of essentially all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).

Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a planetary scale because it’s an efficient use of marginal resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people want to actually eat is going to take more resources, not less, especially when you’re talking about turning pastureland into productive agricultural land.

[1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1...

[2] a lot of feed is also distiller’s grains used for ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we’d wouldn’t even cut out most of that

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