HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the “obscene energy demands of AI” with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm???

Maybe it’s just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what’s arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

  • David GerardMA
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    14
    ·
    2 years ago

    “AI” is a marketing term for various at best slightly related technologies. If you mean LLMs or whatever, you’d need to be specific else you’re not even defining the goalposts before setting them up with wheels.

    • 200fifty
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      11
      ·
      2 years ago

      yeah, I definitely think machine learning has obvious use cases to benefit the common good (youtube auto captions being Actually Pretty Decent Now is one that comes to mind easily) but I’m much less certain about most of the stuff being presently marketed as “AI”

    • Lmaydev@programming.dev
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      2
      arrow-down
      5
      ·
      2 years ago

      AI is the name of the field of study. It has existed since the 60s. LLMs are neural networks one of the first and most widely used forms of AI.

      • flere-imsaho
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        1
        ·
        2 years ago

        how come the reply humans from programming dot dev have always the daftest takes?

      • selfA
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        8
        ·
        2 years ago

        who was this post for

        • blakestaceyA
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          8
          ·
          2 years ago

          It’s not even the right decade; the Dartmouth Summer Research Project on Artificial Intelligence was in 1956.

        • froztbyte
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          4
          ·
          2 years ago

          rubber duck replying, with a stuck posting key