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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

#441

Post by ineedasername »

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…

>that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or for many other industrial purposes.

I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable water as well [1]

I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like an important point until you realize that the cost of turning raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many data centers.

I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering proportional infrastructure cost increases!".

[1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-wastewater...

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#442

Post by fallingfrog »

ACCount37 wrote: post #249
fallingfrog wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

You're being downvoted for displaying the kind of overconfidence that people consider shameful. Everyone in ML has seen dozens to thousands of instances of "I have a radical new idea that will result in a total AI breakthrough" already. Ever wondered why the real breakthroughs are so few and far in between?

I know how it looks. I shouldn't have said anything- it was pointless.

At any rate someone else will figure out what i know soon or already has.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#443

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#444

Post by diamond559 »

hamdingers wrote: post #215
the__alchemist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument assuming "AI skeptics" are illiterate and/or incapable of understanding. You ironically are the one refusing to accept the possibility that you are wrong.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#445

Post by hn_acc1 »

derektank wrote: post #255
kajika91 wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'll take the almonds any day.

Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could have a price system where people can express their preferences by paying for things with money, providing more money to the product which is in greater demand?

Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to live day-to-day with the distorted market.

Tried buying a GPU lately?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#446

Post by whilenot-dev »

keeda wrote: post #425
tharne wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> and we're OK with it

Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed towards one thing at a time.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#447

Post by whilenot-dev »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #432
tharne wrote: post #416

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

No it’s a red herring ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring ) It’s a fundamentally flawed argument

What a weird stance. You agree to mislead or distract from a relevant or important question?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#448

Post by diamond559 »

foxglacier wrote: post #419
Capricorn2481 wrote: post #233

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make it sound frivolous. It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even a net good, to use these in the first place. People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just look at the t…

I wouldn't ignore those arguments but most of the time, they're so poorly formed (eg. using data without logic), they aren't really worth listening to. If you believe AI provides no value, then any environmental cost is too high for you but you can't convey that by trying to dramatize how high it is. That's dishonest and I think people rightly turn off it.

Right now Open"AI", Oracle and everyone else are burning billions of dollars to buy and run these llms, they raise the price of energy around them, they provide negative economic benefit. It's dishonest of you to pretend that isn't the case.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#449

Post by ineedasername »

medvezhenok wrote: post #316
lukan wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, I share your pain .. but was it ever really better in reality? Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had truth as the highest virtue.

Human societies? No. Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e. rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.

This depends on the particular group of rationalists. An unfortunately outsized and vocal group with strong overlap in the tech community has gone to notions of quasi mathematical reasoning distorting things like EV ("expected value"). Many have stretched "reason" way past the breaking point to articles of faith but with a far more pernicious affect than traditional points of religious dogma that are at least more easily identifiable as "faith" due to their religious trappings.

Edit: See Roko's Basilisk as an example. wherein something like variation on Christian hell is independently reinvented for those not donating enough to bring about the coming superhuman AGI, who will therefore punish you- or the closest simulation it can spin up in VR if you're long gone- for all eternity. The infinite negative EV far outweighing any positive EV of doing more than subsist in poverty. Even managed to work in that it could be a reluctant, but otherwise benevolent super AI such that, while benevolent, it wanted to exist, and to maximize its chances it bound itself to a promise in the future to do these things as an incentive for people to get it to exist.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#450

Post by emp17344 »

hamdingers wrote: post #215
the__alchemist wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open minds, and intellectual honesty. I think much of this may be a reactio…

> IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's symbolic opposition to something broader.

We’ve all used the tools, and they’re… fine. They probably will contribute modestly to overall productivity in certain fields, but they certainly aren’t as transformative or magical as the current hype suggests. I’m not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn over these things.
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