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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

#421

Post by pixl97 »

lynndotpy wrote: post #322
Aransentin wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually in California alone. This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for generating their electricity. What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT infrastructure in the US times 4?

Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production, either. Your example would be even more extreme if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle. Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year in the US. The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural resources have…

>Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring increasing resources into almond production,

Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of water by stopping almond production in the western US.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#422

Post by le_stoph »

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…

> And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and several KW to run.

I mean, you could argue that if you take into consideration all the generations (starting from the first amoeba) that it took to get to a standard human brain today, then the total energy used to "train" that brain is far greater. But I get your point and I do agree with you that our current hardware paradigm is probably not what's going to give us "god in a box".

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#423

Post by kragen »

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…

Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center operator doesn't.

I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're probably going to locate your data center where energy is cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100¢ per peak watt, while solar cells cost 12¢ per peak watt, so thermal power won't be competitive for very long.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#424

Post by gwbas1c »

asdfman123 wrote: post #346
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 ne…

Thanks for saying this. I have a similar situation: " I grew up in the church, rejected it in my teens."

I've come to conclude that the problem isn't "religion" in the abstract, it's that the current institutions are unhealthy and sometimes toxic. IE, it's easier to be an atheist, even in name only, when one realizes that the religion they participated in as a child has more problems than benefits.

I sometimes wonder how people like us could create institutions that replace religions, yet generally agree with our beliefs and needs.

---

BTW: I've seen plenty of toxic behavior from atheists too. Aggressive evangelizing ones' beliefs, (or lack thereof,) IMO is a toxic behavior.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#425

Post by keeda »

tharne wrote: post #416
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of which have to do with AI or AGI. Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security than all other companies and countries combined because nobody in the value chain cares about someone else’s aquifer. It’s a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored , which transcends any narrow technological use case. What you describe has been true for all exported manufacturing forever.

Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"? God help us.

My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works to harm the global health of humanity through their addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve human productivity."

Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries, of course, but to a first approximation they are accurate.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#426

Post by gwbas1c »

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…

The LLMs we have today aren't a fantasy: They're a concrete thing that works.

Just because the people who make them live in a fantasy world, doesn't mean we can't reap the fruits of their labor!

That being said, I suspect a lot of the energy spent on AI training is resulting in unusable slop.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#427

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

HDThoreaun wrote: post #324
HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assuming you want to define the goal, "AGI", as something functionally equivalent to part (or all) of the human brain, there are two broad approaches to implement that. 1) Try to build a neuron-level brain simulator - something that is a far distant possibility, not because of compute, but because we don't have a clear enough idea of how the brain is wired, how neurons work, and what level of fidelity is needed to ca…

Hard problem of consciousness seems way harder to wolve than the easy one which is a purely engineering problem. People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea.

> People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea

I'm not sure what you mean by this.

I think there is a pretty large consensus that our neocortex is a prediction machine (predicting future observations/outcomes from past experience), and the reason WHY it would have evolved to be this is because there is obvious massive survival benefit in successfully predicting how predators and prey will react ahead of time, what will be the outcome of your own actions, etc, etc. Prediction unlocks you from being stuck in the present having to react to things as they happen and lets you plan ahead.

Thinking = Reasoning/Planning is just multi-step prediction.

I don't think consciousness is the big deal most people think it is - it seems to be just the ability to self-observe (which helps to self-predict), but if we somehow built AGI that wasn't conscious, then who cares?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#428

Post by marcosdumay »

red75prime wrote: post #153
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.

Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations? Those situations are close in other aspects too: we have a physical system (the sun, the brain), whose functionality we try to replicate technologically.

> Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations?

Yes. And the people talking about "bringing the power of the Sun to Earth" are usually either full of shit or expect so little from their audience that they are effectively talking shit (or are making clickbait, what's the same). (And yes, there's a lot of fraud around fusion too.)

The people doing actual work don't use phrases like that in normal conversation.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#429

Post by gwbas1c »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #60

We should do things because they are hard, not because they are cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this stuff on a phone and it isn't terribl…

> I think the climate impact of data centers is way overstated relative to the ginormous amounts of emissions from other sources. Yes it's not pretty but it's a fairly minor problem compared to people buying SUVs and burning their way through millions of tons of fuel per day to get their asses to work and back. Just a simple example. There are plenty.

Oh no.

AI data centers are sucking up so much power it's making everyone's electric bill go up.

That's a tangible problem that dramatically impacts the poor and average person.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#430

Post by buu700 »

kragen wrote: post #423
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…

Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers—except when the farmer owns the water and the data center opera…

Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate. Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all.

It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first few plants go live and mass production begins within the next decade. Knock on wood.

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