Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

521–530 of 683 posts

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#521

Post by simonw »

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…

Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake) about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his initial take about it not being a big deal: https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce...

Key quote:

> If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable water, the best way to make potable water more available and cheaper is to introduce a new large buyer, which will give the local utility enough revenue to upgrade and expand their treatment facilities. Saying that my data is misleading because Al "only uses valuable potable water" actually gets the issue backwards: adding demand for more potable water in regions with lots of freshwater makes potable water cheaper and more abundant for everyone else per unit.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#522

Post by roywiggins »

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.

Well, yeah. And I'm not vegetarian either. But it's just a fact that beef production is a vastly less efficient user of water than datacenters.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#523

Post by skinnymuch »

simianwords wrote: post #490
danaris wrote: post #372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, I think golf courses shouldn't exist. They're awful in a number of ways. You want to play golf? VR or minigolf. But (as I pointed out elsewhere in this discussion [0]) why should I have to mention everything that uses water in a way I think is detrimental in order to be allowed to talk about why I think this thing uses water in a way that is detrimental? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927558

if you are at the point where you have to suggest golf courses shouldn't exist then sorry we are completely on different page here. your logic will extend to just doing nothing at all because it will take resources from other things that you value.

Why would the logic extend there? If golf courses really do use a lot of water, energy, etc, and they largely benefit a small subset of people, it doesn’t make a ton of sense for them to exist.

Of course making the world a better place for everyone is very against western and American exceptionalism and freedom.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#524

Post by yallpendantools »

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.

> it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.

Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media?

I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can study the math behind the model, the transformer architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see how it can get more purely technical than that.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#525

Post by simonw »

yallpendantools wrote: post #524
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.

> it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole. Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the topic was about social media? I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is a foundational source of information. OTOH, on…

The frustrating thing is when you're debating people who firmly believe that generative AI "has no utility"... but also refuse to ever try it themselves.

(Which they might even justify because they've read the transformer paper or whatever. That doesn't help inform you if these things actually have practical applications!)

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#526

Post by t43562 »

Why is AGI so hungry? Our brains learn on the fly and do amazing things and how much energy do they use?

So IMO we certainly haven't hit the "right technology" yet and the attempt to achieve it by spending billions, building nuclear power plants etc, is vulnerable to a technical development. So why should we screw up our environmental situation for something that can obviously be done in a vastly better way on the energy equivalent of 3 square meals a day?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#527

Post by jamesoofou »

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…

skip water discussion because it's just irrelevant. If you can debunk AGI then of course we should stop spending trillions on it. If you can't debunk AGI then water usage is just a nonfactor.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#529

Post by jamesoofou »

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.

How can u look at progress in LLMs and think "this is mirage"

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#530

Post by jamesoofou »

geerlingguy wrote: post #8

I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor. Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and I'm done. There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once they're solved. And the thing that made Whi…

What do you think about the shape of AI progress?
Post reply on HN