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AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

tomwphillips.co.uk

531–540 of 683 posts

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#531

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> 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…

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Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#532

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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?

I was supporting the GPs premise directly

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#533
post #436
post #430

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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 de…

I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI ) but all the other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy powering steam engines…

I'm definitely more optimistic about Helion. It's the one that would really dramatically change the economics of power generation at scale, and they seem to have substantially engineered around major challenges like not requiring ignition and minimizing losses to Bremsstrahlung radiation. I like that they're laser-focused on launching and delivering commercial value, even if that means a bit less transparency and less focus on research demonstrations than many would prefer.

If Helion delivers Orion on anywhere close to the target timeline, it seems like they'd be primed to kick off mass production and start shipping units all over the country with minimal regulatory hurdles. With sufficiently high productive capacity, it would effectively make all other forms of power generation obsolete at utility scale. Solar would still great for small/decentralized use cases, but there wouldn't be as much reason for a power company to build new solar plants if they had the option to fill the same real estate with a bunch of Helion machines.

That being said, I'm not not optimistic about steam-based fusion power. It would be less revolutionary, but from what I understand would still be a huge advancement. My read is that it would effectively obsolete fission power and plausibly fossil fuel power as well, if not also grid-scale renewables. It would be like having SMRs with higher efficiency and no major proliferation or meltdown concerns that amplify costs. High neutron output and steam conversion add costs and complexity, but if CFS panned out and Helion didn't, I'd hardly turn my nose at that.

I could also see a world where multiple forms of fusion power pan out, and it turns out to be economical for Helion to sell tritium to other vendors like CFS rather than storing it for 12 years until it decays to He3. Maybe we'd even have colocated plants in a certain ratio where Helion provides on-site tritium generation in the exact volume needed for a D-T reactor.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#534

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Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the water cycle.

Drinking water does not magically appears in the water cycle the next day. [0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data centers, and this is our largest data centers, are located in areas of high or extremely high water stress. And that's really shocking because data centers require huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their servers." [0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of America's AI…

Areas of "high water stress" sound very sunny, which presumably is great news for renewable power generation.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#535

How refreshing to see an AI realistic view on HN these days! As the author said, no one is claiming transformer tech useless, the issue is the relentless drive to claim loudly that transformers will lead to AGI in the next few years and solve all existing problems and that it is worth the current negative damage to society and the environment. HN has proven remarkably resilient to every hype trend out there but clear…

I did not get the sentiment here on HN that AGI is right behind the next corner.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#536

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Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!). I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves, she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from lo…

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.

I think the point is: where does this end? Do we continue to build orders-of-magnitude bigger models guzzling orders-of-magnitude more water and other resources, in pursuit of the elusive AGI?

At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on realizing practical benefits from the models we currently have.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#537

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.

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.

> I’m not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn over these things.

I'm not sure why all the replies under this comment are full of projections of extreme opinions I do not hold and never said I did.

If you want to have a conversation with someone who thinks like this you can probably find one in this very thread, so why do you respond to me?

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#538

> 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). I agree with the first two points, but as others have commented the environmental claim here is just not compelling. Starting up your computer is technically creating environmental waste. By his metrics solving technical problems et…

It's probably unethical to solve a problem you could do yourself in 5 minutes at the energy cost of a packet of crisps by using.....lets say....a kilogram of coal. Or two kilos or whatever. But you can't see the cost so it seems free. You might see the money but we haven't linked this to environmental cost yet.

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#539
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"

Because the depth of concept is so deep, and if you're just beginning then it's going to take a while for that statement to illuminate how obvious it is.

For those who've been sniffing this since early 2010, it's so blindly obvious they've already dropped llms on the floor and moved onto deeper alternative research.

For the rest of us, we're still catching coke bottles from the sky and building places of worship around them

Re: AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering

#540
post #47

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You're not wrong. My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you discuss. And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it now, I mentally discount or stop reading. Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the a…

> It's an externality like you discuss. It's not even an externality? They just pay market price for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.

If datacenters are getting electricity and water at a rate lower than retail (costs passed on to residents or tax payers), and factors like noise and water pollution aren't factored in, then yes there are unpriced externalities.
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