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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

#461

Post by AgentME »

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…

>Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for their high water use.

If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest consumers of it.)

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#462

Post by ineedasername »

zzzeek wrote: post #374
nasmorn wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the office. Why is this as special domain?

debating the environmental and public health effects of AI negates the possibility of debating those same things with respect to cars/trucks ?

Charitably, I think you can read into that a not-unreasonable (if unproven) assertion that there are many lower hanging fruits on the tree that would do endlessly more good for the cause to pick than data centers, and AI at least has the arguable potential upside of alleviating some of those specific burdens-- better health care and less environmental pollution through various improved forms of automation. Or at least when addressing the stub claim of the sort in the GP comment, you should assume these fairly straightforward subclaims pre-emptively and respond to this stronger form of the argument. It saves time, at least if you're going to seek out a discussion it does. Plenty of counter claims to them, but it gets the conversational ball rolling in a productive direction and if the response in turn is less constructive then you also know not to bother any more.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#463

Post by hamdingers »

diamond559 wrote: post #444
hamdingers wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument

There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not hard to find, though I see them more on reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN.

If that does not describe you then my comment is not about you.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#464

Post by stavros »

emp17344 wrote: post #456
stavros wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy that I don't have to waste time in an argument against someone out of touch with reality.

If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP should be skyrocketing. We haven’t seen any of this, and every time a study is conducted, it’s determined that AI is modestly useful at best.

I don't need data to know that I use it every day and offload lots of tasks to it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#465

Post by keeda »

danaris wrote: post #137
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.

Yes, it is worthwhile to ask how much value we get. And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value in all these datacenters being built and run at full power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just keep ignoring or dismissing that. It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides some value. That is not the same thing as saying that it provides enough value to justify all of the resources bein…

That's a fair point. For people already finding great utility in GenAI it seems like a foregone conclusion, but for others it can be understandably frustrating that people take it as an article of faith that "AI is worth it."

Disclosure, I'm very much in the former camp, but I try to ground myself with broader empirical evidence. I've found an increasing amount of empirical evidence that GenAI is providing value more than commensurate with its costs.

Largely the studies I've looked at focus on productivity boosts, I guess because that is very easy to tie to economic impact. This recent thread has some relevant sources and extremely rough numbers, but the outcome seems to be that for a 1% increase in datacenter usage we may have gotten a 1.2% boost in national productivity: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907

Now, this absolutely not a rigorous analysis, but could be a good starting point for how to think about these tradeoffs.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#466

Post by brandensilva »

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…

Quantum compute is my guess. Being able to switch entire models at atomic speeds will give the perception of intelligence at least. There is still a lot there that will need to be figured out between now and then.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#467

Post by jimbokun »

asdfman123 wrote: post #349
jimbokun wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's why it's very important to work for an organization run by engineers or former engineers when writing software.

And engineers who actually shipped and maintained successful products over time.

For software developed in-house by non-software organizations, the incentives are all wrong because management cannot properly assess the value of well architected systems.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#468

Post by didibus »

Aransentin wrote: post #50
lynndotpy wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the same utility for water used. You are not making an argument against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.

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?

Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's production?

Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?

I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more apples to apples.

Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never get to experience the taste of an almond and all the cuisine that comes with it.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#470

Post by theevilsharpie »

anal_reactor wrote: post #129
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…

Try explaining to someone who's only ever seen dial-up modems that 4k HDR video streaming is a thing.

Dial-up modems can transfer a 4K HDR video file, or any other arbitrary data.

It obviously wouldn't have the bandwidth to do so in a way that would make a real-time stream feasible, but it doesn't involve any leap of logic to conclude that a higher bandwidth link means being able to transfer more data within a given period of time, which would eventually enable use cases that weren't feasible before.

In contrast, you could throw an essentially unlimited amount of hardware at LLMs, and that still wouldn't mean that they would be able to achieve AGI, because there's no clear mechanism for how they would do so.

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