They'll just buy some more fake carbon credits, tell everyone it'll be alright and the planet won't overheat now. Nothing to see here, move along.
Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
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Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#12It seems the article forgot to mention that Microsoft is actively pursuing nuclear energy in response, which is a significant omission.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#13A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that effici…
The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know.
Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - meanwhile, a Tesla consumes 0.35kWh a minute at freeway speed.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#14[flagged]
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Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#15It seems the article forgot to mention that Microsoft is actively pursuing nuclear energy in response, which is a significant omission.
[deleted]
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#16A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that effici…
AI isn't the most efficient way to retrieve accurate information or to generate quality content, it's the most efficient way to retrieve plausible information and generate poor quality art and code. And that's really interesting.
There is a group of people that trust LLMs for all searches but most tech-literate people know they hallucinate, and understand roughly how an LLM works and that hallucinations are indistinguishable from the truth to the model. And so we still Google things and read books.
The same applies to AI-generated art, music, voiceovers, and code. They are technically impressive, but rarely meet client expectations in any industry. And so most artists and programmers still produce the work themselves.
AI is fantastic for low-quality content, and this explosion of AI is emblematic of how people often lack a filter for quality of information they put in their brains. This isn't new; YouTube has always had more low-quality content than high-quality pieces, probably 1000:1 if not a higher contrast. However, AI shows the scale like no tech has shown it to us before (and maybe this was known by some people at Google or Bing but not so publicly). Almost everyone consumes AI work — blogs, movie posters, art, music, and code. The market is massive but all AI does is reproduce the existing work it was loss-minimized on and the loss of quality is mathematically necessary unless the model is not a neural net, but a database of literally the entire dataset itself that is being searched.
So this is very interesting. When did we become so okay with feeding ourselves a fast food diet of content? Isn't that causing more harm than good? The scale of this phenomenon is truly (and literally) industrial. I myself can hardly imagine what the modern life would look like if people turned to the internet, let's say, only to look up facts and information they already seek. We are so far from that. And AI both illustrates it, and exacerbates it.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#17It seems the article forgot to mention that Microsoft is actively pursuing nuclear energy in response, which is a significant omission.
Would be interesting if one of the major benefits of AI is it pushing us to clean energy
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#18A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that effici…
It's either that or population control / reduction, so technology would be the better choice.
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#19A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that effici…
The positive side is supercomputers help us analyze the climate, the Atlantic current, and so forth. The negative side is they also help locate oil. Is it a win or loss on net? Hard to know. Thinking of entertainment, it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world. Supposedly a GPT-4 query costs 0.01kWh - m…
> it probably IS a climate win if you spend an hour at home watching Netflix or chatting with GPT, as opposed to driving around town or jetting across the world.
Nope.
Look back to the GP's paradox and the energy consumed watching even just the single most popular youtube video . . .
That isn't "energy saved" from "otherwise people would be flocking miles in cars to watch Despacito and Baby Shark Dance in theatres.
The AI training loads are over and above the already existing supercomputer modelling of land|sea|air fluid flows vie regular means - it's questionable whether LLM's et al even add anything of values in that domain (despite a plethora of papers asserting it to be so).
Re: Microsoft's Emissions Spike 29% as AI Gobbles Up Resources
#20A good moment to bring up Jevon's Paradox ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox ) "In economics, the Jevons paradox occurs when technological progress increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the falling cost of use induces increases in demand enough that resource use is increased, rather than reduced. Governments typically assume that effici…
Relieving some latent demand is a great thing, especially when you’re the one needing that last new hospital bed, traffic lane, or supercomputer time slot to predict who the hurricane endangers. More throughput is wonderful. When unsure, best to endorse meeting demand rather than judging it as unworthy.