Live data from Hacker News

The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

wired.com

21–30 of 57 posts

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#21

Has someone already made a cryptocurrency that requires that miners train an AI to demonstrate proof of work?

I kid you not, I read a scheme such a thing a year ago.

But now I cant find the source... video encoding mining seems to have gained more traction :/.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.

> I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. Okay, you're dismissing the argument without proposing any counter arguments. J. Storrs Hall lays out the case for the relationship between energy usage & quality of life. What are your specific rebuttals?

It is not self-evident to me that QoL improvements are necessarily driven by increased energy consumption. Not having read J. Storrs Hall, I do not have any specific rebuttals to that.

When I have heard such assertions before, I dug a little and found it was based on extrapolation. Sorry, if that isn't implicit in yours or J. Storrs Hall's thinking.

Ultimately, any system that seems to grow exponentially will eventually be found to have been on an S-Curve. We can argue the timing of reaching the plateau after the fact, but it is certain that no system can continue to grow exponentially indefinitely. Nor should it have to.

Global human population for instance should start to reverse centuries of growth this century. In the case of population flattening, perhaps we can agree this is to the good. I would argue much the same about energy consumption.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#23

Energy source > Energy consumption. Energy consumption is not a bogeyman and we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier. We need to pivot to cleaner sources, so the focus should be on that. Would be great if the journos could stop demonizing the wrong thing.

That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction.

This is the abstention-only of climate management.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction.

> That doesn't change the fact that first and cleaner renewable energy source is consumption reduction. 1) That's not a fact 2) That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically 3) Consumption reduction = lower quality of life & health for poor people (the rich have 0 interest in consumption reduction... do you see the davos crowd turning in their private jets?)

Assuming "cleaner" means more sustainable for the environment (not only carbon footprint, but considering biodiversity), then I think it's pretty much a fact: we are living a mass extinction right now, and that's really correlated to our energy consumption.

If it's purely about carbon footprint ("let's finish killing the biodiversity and make living on Earth as close as possible to what it would be to live on Mars"), then it's still debatable whether or not we could keep increasing consumption with the end of fossil fuels (and that's coming).

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#25
post #12
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s all well and good to say, but we currently have no system to do that. What we ought to have is a carbon tax. Then if some activity such as bitcoin or ai or driving or flying uses carbon, you pay extra. Whereas if you manage to fuel your activities with nuclear/wind/solar you don’t. There are loads of complexities to this but simply saying “consumption is necessary for riches” while ignoring that we have not ma…

we do currently have a system to pivot to cleaner sources; it's the photovoltaic module industry, which has undercut the price of fossil-fuel energy by almost a factor of two in much of the world, though not in polar regions

A photovoltaic industry that mostly depends on fossil fuels, doesn't it?

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#26

Energy source > Energy consumption. Energy consumption is not a bogeyman and we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier. We need to pivot to cleaner sources, so the focus should be on that. Would be great if the journos could stop demonizing the wrong thing.

ML training also seems like it ought to be fairly dispatchable, right? Pause the training if there isn’t excess wind or solar. We’ll want to overbuild on renewable power capacity, so that if it not at peak, the lights can stay on. Having a use for that excess power seems like it ought to help economically incentivize the building.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> we'll need to consume vastly more energy if we want to make people richer, healthier and happier I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. No argument that changing energy sources is crucial. But I would not dismiss a plan to also reduce overall energy consumption while maintaining or improving quality of life indicators.

> I have frequently heard this argument made - often as here axiomatically. Okay, you're dismissing the argument without proposing any counter arguments. J. Storrs Hall lays out the case for the relationship between energy usage & quality of life. What are your specific rebuttals?

Not the OP, but fossil fuels are not unlimited, until now we don't have anything close to them, and anyway more energy consumption tends to go with more loss of habitat (talking biodiversity).

I think there is a case to make about reducing energy consumption.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#29

I kinda hate these articles about the carbon cost of compute- it's utterly short sighted, gpt3 is infrastructure that creates huge efficiencies - the cost is a bargain. Not to mention this is like early days and we're driving down the costs everyday.

Sources for the "creates huge efficiencies" part?

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#30

Isn't it the case that training a ML model consumes vastly more power than using the trained model for inference? If so, the problem may be somewhat overstated. Training is a dispatchable power load. It can be scheduled for periods of surplus power in regions where surplus power is periodically abundant. Training a ML model could literally follow the sun.

Note that if you have surplus of power, maybe you want to use it more wisely :).
Post reply on HN