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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

#341

Post by cesarb »

josefx wrote: post #283
cesarb wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some time ago, I read the environmental impact assessment for a proposed natural gas thermal power plant, and in it they emphasized that their water usage was very low (to the point that it fit within the unused part of the water usage allowance for an already existing natural gas thermal power plant on the same site) because they used non-evaporative cooling. What prevents data centers from using non-evaporative coo…

Does it route the hot water back into a river? In europe several power plants get shut down each summer because the heated water from those plants would have significant impact on the local wildlife.

> Does it route the hot water back into a river?

That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#342

Post by jimbokun »

travisgriggs wrote: post #161

> 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). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Sud…

I think LLMs as a replacement for Google, Stack Overflow, etc. is a no brainer. As long as you can get to the source documents when you need them, and train yourself to sniff out hallucinations.

(We already do this constantly in categorizing human generated bullshit information and useful information constantly. So learning to do something similar with LLM output is not necessarily worse, just different.)

What's silly at this point is replacing a human entirely with an LLM. LLMs are still fundamentally unsuited for those tasks, although they may be in the future with some significant break throughs.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#343

Post by lynndotpy »

gishh wrote: post #213
roywiggins wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The water intensity of American food production would be substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like beef, which requires water vastly out of proportion to its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem scary then the water use numbers for the average American's beef consumption is apocalyptic.

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.

While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to increasingly being a luxury.

The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#344

Post by advisedwang »

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…

It's even worse than number of input/outputs, number of neurons, efficiency or directional feedback.

The brain also has plasticity! The connections between neurons change dynamically - an extra level of meta.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#345

Post by jimbokun »

asdfman123 wrote: post #340
travisgriggs wrote: post #161

> 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). Me too. But, I worry this “want” may not be realistic/scalable. Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things were making progress then just fine. Sud…

> It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy. This is the real AI risk we should be worried about IMO, at least short term. Information technology has made things vastly more complicated. AI will make it even more incomprehensible. Tax code, engineering, car design, whatever. It's already happening at my work.…

Has anyone tried putting the AIs to work cleaning up the technical debt?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#346

Post by asdfman123 »

lordleft wrote: post #59

The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes still endures.

I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized" part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority.

I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it. If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else.

We all need ways to find deep connection with other humans and the universe around us. We need basic moral principles to operate on. I think most atheists like myself have quietly found this or are in the process of finding this, but it's ok to say it out loud.

For me it means meditation, frugality, and strict guidelines on how I treat others. That's like a religion, I guess. But that's OK. I embrace it. By owning it and naming it, you have mastery over it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#347

Post by runarberg »

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…

Arguments in isolation are usually poor. The water usage arguments usually (always?) comes along with a bunch of other arguments, including power consumption, workers rights, consumer protection, public safety, enshittifcation, etc.

When evaluating the economical cost or morality of a thing, (just like when training a machine learning model) the more data you consider the more accurate the result (although just like statistical modelling it is worth to be wary of overfitting).

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#348

Post by nasmorn »

buellerbueller wrote: post #156
simonw wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value we get per liter of water used. If data centers and farms used the same amount of water we should absolutely be talking about their comparative value to society, and farms would win. Farms use thousands of times more water than data centers.

Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument: Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do not NEED any of LLMs' outputs. Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage for LLMs.

Stop eating beef. With the water saved we can grow enough food for any realistic human population. Ok we solved this one. Or do humans NEED burgers as well? We can already feed all people, any starvation is strictly a political problem not a food existing on the planet problem

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#349

Post by asdfman123 »

jimbokun wrote: post #345
asdfman123 wrote: post #340

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s as if we’ve made technology so complex, that the only way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the associated AGI fantasy. This is the real AI risk we should be worried about IMO, at least short term. Information technology has made things vastly more complicated. AI will make it even more incomprehensible. Tax code, engineering, car design, whatever. It's already happening at my work.…

Has anyone tried putting the AIs to work cleaning up the technical debt?

Yes, I'm already doing it. But the problem is there's not a lot of incentive from management to do it.

Long term investment in something that can't easily be quantified is a non-starter to management. People will say "thank you for doing that" but those who create new features that drive metrics get promoted.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#350

Post by jimbokun »

Etheryte wrote: post #2

Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation, you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.

"Fundamental dead end" strikes me as hyperbolic. Clearly they could be an import part of an "AGI" system, even if they're not sufficient for building an AGI in and of themselves?
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