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The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

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Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#31

Post by tomjen3 »

albertopv wrote: post #14
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #2

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.

Doesn't matter. Humans are not going to accept the the massively sustained decrease in living standards that it would require, which means it is not a politically acceptable solution, and therefore not a solution.

Whereas spending some money to get us all nuclear might be. If not, we will have to spend more to metigate the effects of global warming.

If we really wanted to solve this quickly and efficiently, we could kill all humans.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#32

Post by kragen »

palata wrote: post #25
kragen wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

no, it mostly depends on energy

the production processes for the key materials involved, like silicon, aluminum, and glass, can use any convenient energy source

the exception is the carbon dioxide emissions from the carbon electrodes in aluminum smelting pots, but this is a tiny fraction of the total

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#33

Post by lovemenot »

lovemenot wrote: post #22
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 eventua…

I just looked at J. Storrs Hall page on Wikipedia and saw Kurzweil in the References there.

Would it be fair to call J. Storrs Hall a Singularitarian ? If so, it figures. We can argue the merits of such arguments, but it is a reach to state them axiomatically.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#34

Post by lovemenot »

palata wrote: post #30
lovemenot wrote: post #11

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 :).

Perhaps, you are right about utility, but I can think of few power loads as well suited to dispatch.

Bauxite has to be shipped to Iceland to take advantage of their abundant geothermal and hydro power for Aluminium smelting. Data moves with much less friction.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#35

Post by colechristensen »

graeme wrote: post #9
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #2

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’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…

Carbon taxes aren’t necessary to give solar and wind an advantage. More than half of ~55GW new power generation capacity in the US this year is going to be solar.

> while ignoring that we have not managed to lower our carbon usage

We have in the US, both total and per capita. Carbon per person is down nearly 25% since 2000.

People seem to make up statistics in their heads to match what they think is going on.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#36

Post by janalsncm »

yowzadave wrote: post #3

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

Could be interesting. One way to do it would be to have a training set and a hidden test set, and mining a coin means arbitrarily high performance on the test set. In order to keep the test set hidden from miners (otherwise they could just memorize it) they would need to upload their weights to be validated.

The main issue I see is that many of these models are massive. Dozens of gigabytes. You’ll quickly DDOS your validator nodes before getting anything useful.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#37

Post by orwin »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16
albertopv wrote: post #14

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?)

Having a house with better insulation reduced my mother energy costs from 6k to 2k, with 2022 being a year where the electricity was more expensive.

She does not have weirdly distributed heat islands in her house, and supported this winter way better than past years.

She reduced her consumption by 3, increasing her quality of life.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#38

Post by albertopv »

LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16
albertopv wrote: post #14

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?)

"That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically"

I'm sorry, still trying to learn a foreing language, thank for your caring advice.

"Consumption reduction = lower quality of life "

That's false, see LED lights.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#39

Post by andromeduck »

kragen wrote: post #32
palata wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

no, it mostly depends on energy the production processes for the key materials involved, like silicon, aluminum, and glass, can use any convenient energy source the exception is the carbon dioxide emissions from the carbon electrodes in aluminum smelting pots, but this is a tiny fraction of the total

That convenient energy source needs to be stable, which most renewables are far from.

Re: The Generative AI Race Has a Dirty Secret

#40

Post by andromeduck »

albertopv wrote: post #38
LewisVerstappen wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?)

"That sentence doesn't make any sense grammatically" I'm sorry, still trying to learn a foreing language, thank for your caring advice. "Consumption reduction = lower quality of life " That's false, see LED lights.

Efficiency has it's limits and many industrial processes are already pretty close.
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