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Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

blog.jakesaunders.dev

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#91
post #42
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.

Seeing this kind of populist misinformation/bikeshedding on HN is particularly disappointing.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#92
post #57
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is one of the causes that climate change is accelerating, which is another in a long list of reasons to hate it.

Im not sure I follow. AI barely consumes energy compared to other industries and instead of focusing on the heavy hitters first wasting time on the climate impact on AI doesn’t seem useful

Pretty large amounts of energy go towards training large language models. Running them is also a non-negligible energy cost at scale.

But yeah, there's way worse industries out there when it comes to climate change impact.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#93
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

How did HN become this kind of website?

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#95
post #81
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> incredible amounts of ... energy So tired of seeing this trope. Data center energy expenditure is like less than 1% of worldwide energy expenditure[1]. Have you heard of mining? Or agriculture? Or cars/airplanes/ships? It's just factually wrong and alarmist to spread the fake news that AI has any measurable effect on climate change. [1] https://www.iea.org/reports/energy-and-ai/energy-supply-for-...

It's not just the absolute expenditure. It's the type of expenditure. https://www.selc.org/news/resistance-against-elon-musks-xai-...

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#97
“Everything has already been said, but not yet by everyone.” — Karl Valentin

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Personally, I'm still very interested in the topic.

But since the tech is moving very fast, the discussion is just very very unevenly distributed: There's lots of interesting things to say. But a lot of takes that were relevant 6 months ago are still being digested by most.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#98
post #18

AI is fine . The hype is annoying. What's even worse though are the incredible amounts of money and energy that are being thrown at it, with no regard for the consequences, in times of record inequality and looming climate apocalypse. AI is the red herring that'll waste all our attention until it's too late.

> AI is fine. The hype is annoying.

I'm finding the detractors worse than the hype, because it seems like a certain subset of detractors [0] formed their opinion on AI in late 2022/early 2023 when ChatGPT came out (REALLY!? Over 3 years ago!?) and then never updated their opinions since then. They'll say things like "why would I want to consume X amount of energy and Y amount of water just to get a wrong answer?"

In other words, the people who think generative AI is an absolutely worthless and useless product are more annoying than the ones that think it's going to solve all the world's problems. They have no idea how much AI has improved since it reached center stage 3 years ago. Hallucinations are exceptionally rare now, since they now rely on searching for answers rather than what was in its training data.

We got Claude Desktop at work and it's been a godsend. It works so much better to find information from Confluence and present it to me in a digestible format than having to search by hand and combing through a dozen irrelevant results to find the one bit of information I need.

[0] For the purpose of this comment, this subset is meant to be detraction based on the quality of the product, not the other criticisms like copyright/content theft concerns, water/energy usage, whether or not Sam Altman is a good person, etc.

Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#99
post #2

Not me

I'm not sure if this is a joke but the field is advancing so dramatically it's hard to stop talking about it. Every week at work I have to show a new AI feature to an executive, about how we can now write 1000's of lines of codes in minutes at a higher quality than the greatest engineers. This necessitates new tools and new purchases, as well as team and org shifts. If you're reading this and your life hasn't been th…

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Re: Is anybody else bored of talking about AI?

#100

I think what's crazy is the desire to replicate current day corporate structures. Look at this multi agent Jira story reading bot that builds stuff cause we let it churn overnight. Like the whole idea that you don't need that nonsense to build something amazing.

See also this insanity: https://github.com/garrytan/gstack/
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