Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't want to sound skeptical, but this is what Crypto people used to say when it was very new. It was supposedly worth all the power expenditure, because changing the world needed energy. Now we see where we are. I'm inside this "newfangled AI thing". There are groups which create value, but they create value for everybody. The humans and the nature in general, and they use AI for scientific ends. Medical image pr…
To be fair, newer research is demonstrating that smaller more power efficient models with the same performance are possible, so the hope is that these giant LLMs are just a stepping stone to a less energy hungry place. In contrast, proof of work fundamentally needs more energy then bigger the network gets. It's no guarantee but we can at least see some hope that as energy impact drops and increasing value is found th…
Also, I'm very aware that there are many smaller models in production which can run real-time with negligible power and memory requirements (i.e. see human/animal detection models in mirrorless cameras, esp. Sony and Fuji).
However, to be honest I didn't see the same research on LLMs yet. Can you share if you have any, because I'd be glad to read them.
Lastly, I'm aware that AI is not something only covers object detection, NLP, etc. You can create very useful and light AI systems for many problems, but how LLMs pumped with that unstopping hype machine bothers me a lot.