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The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

kaveland.no

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Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#261

Post by ToucanLoucan »

Llamamoe wrote: post #135
sheiyei wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

YET.

It's very possible that they never will, that instead the advertising will be so subtle nobody will be able to detect it. Including phrases similar to what products, brands, and their actual ads use in positive contexts, sentences that don't mention but make you think of products, being just slightly likely to bring a brand up than its competitor, and a tiny bit more critical of it, etc. The goal isn't to have an ad-…

> It's very possible that they never will

Oh come on.

Genuinely.

Come on.

Look at every single tech innovation of the last 20 years and say that again.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#263

Post by babypuncher »

karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

We went through this with all the Silicon Valley "disruptors" in the '00s and '10s. It's fun while they're focused solely on burning VC money to build a massive userbase, but as soon as they decide it's time to start actually making money the deal gets a lot less sweet. Only by that time, most of the competitors are gone and you don't have much choice.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#264

Post by ars »

bawolff wrote: post #36
jay_kyburz wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you imagine how much better it would be if people were paid to create the content!

I think it would be worse. Money tends to ruin collaborative communities.

It doesn't need to be collaborative, people write books for money all the time.

It's how the vast majority of human knowledge has been stored and perpetuated for millennia.

This new business of people writing up their knowledge for free (wikpedia, stackexchange, forums, reddit, etc) is relatively new, and only semi-working.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#265

Post by autoexec »

baggy_trough wrote: post #249
ksenzee wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re restarting coal-fired power plants to run AI datacenters. I don’t know what your personal threshold is for “massive” environmental harm, but that meets mine.

What's a specific example of that?

https://www.iwf.org/2025/02/13/as-power-demand-rises-existin...

https://www.alleghenyfront.org/homer-city-pennsylvania-gas-p...

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-should-restart-sh...

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#266

Post by coryrc »

gknoy wrote: post #250
baggy_trough wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is this massive environmental harm? That sounds like hyperbole.

Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be indiustry reports [2, pag…

USA uses 21.3 TWh of petroleum per day for transportation. Even if AI was fully responsible for all data center usage (it is not even close) we're quibbling over 20 days of US transportation oil usage, which actually has devastating effects on the environment.

Data centers are already significant users of renewable electricity. They do not contaminate water in any appreciable amount.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#267

Post by autoexec »

baggy_trough wrote: post #259
gknoy wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Training AI models uses a large amount of energy (according to what I've read / headlines I've seen /etc), and increases water usage. [0] I don't have a lot to offer as proof, merely that this is an idea that I have encountered enough that I was suprised you hadn't heard of it. I did a very cursory bit of googling, so the quality + dodginess distribution is a bit wild, but there appear to be indiustry reports [2, pag…

I agree that there is some incremental electricity usage. I do not think it can be characterized fairly as "massive environmental harm".

As an example, Ren and his colleagues calculated the emissions from training a large language model, or LLM, at the scale of Meta’s Llama-3.1, an advanced open-weight LLM released by the owner of Facebook in July to compete with leading proprietary models like OpenAI's GPT-4. The study found that producing the electricity to train this model produced an air pollution equivalent of more than 10,000 round trips by car between Los Angeles and New York City. (https://news.ucr.edu/articles/2024/12/09/ais-deadly-air-poll...)

see also:

https://www.techrepublic.com/article/news-ai-data-centers-dr...

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/a-computer-scient...

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#268

Post by wood_spirit »

beAbU wrote: post #215
willvarfar wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

hey! it's my dream, and in my dream world it would be commissioned from academia :)

I hope the academia of your dreams create code that is not like real-world academia :)

Academia has the full gamut of software quality. A good example what springs to mind is Wirths operating systems work at ETH.

In the same way that the early google made it great to put top minds on mundane problems, let’s imagine that an institute can make a knowledge-first search engine and AI. It’s about aligning incentives.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#269

Post by coryrc »

svnt wrote: post #256
baggy_trough wrote: post #254

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I spent some time and could not find a specific example. You haven't shown one here, either.

Here is one: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/doe-coal-fired-power-plant-... Here is another: https://www.utilitydive.com/news/trump-coal-executive-order-...

trump stooge activities cannot be blamed on data centers. The relevant technical authorities did not want this.

Re: The librarian immediately attempts to sell you a vuvuzela

#270

Post by umvi »

autoexec wrote: post #239
karel-3d wrote: post #78

The money situation is what gives me pause with LLMs. The amount of money it's burned on this is giant; those companies will need to make so much money to have any possibility of return. The idea is that we will all spend more money on AI that we spend on phones, and we will spend it on those companies only... I don't know, it just doesn't add up. As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing a…

> As a user it's a great free ride though. Maybe there IS such a thing as a free lunch after all! if you consider the massive environmental harm AI has and continues to cause, the people whose work has been stolen to create it, the impacts on workers and salaries, and the abuses AI enables that free lunch starts looking more expensive.

> the people whose work has been stolen to create it

"Stolen" is kind of a loaded word. It implies the content was for sale and was taken without payment. I don't think anyone would accuse a person of stealing if they purchased GRRM's books, studied the prose and then used the knowledge they gained from studying to write a fanfic in the style of GRRM (or better yet, the final 2 books). What was stolen? "the prose style"? Seems too abstract. (yes, I know the counter argument is "but LLMs can do more quickly and at a much greater scale", and so forth)

I generally want less copyright, not more. I'm imagining a dystopian future where every article on the internet has an implicit huge legal contract you enter into like "you are allowed to read this article with your eyeballs only, possibly you are also allowed to copy/paste snippets with attribution, and I suppose you are allowed to parody it, but you aren't allowed to parody it with certain kinds of computer assistance such as feeding text into an LLM and asking it to mimic my style, and..."

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