Hacker News Reader

Comment by dns_snek | Hacker News Reader

For all the posturing and crypto hate on HN, we're entering a world where it's socially acceptable to use 1000W of computing power and 5 seconds of inference time to parse a tiny HTML fragment which would take microseconds with traditional methods - and people are cheering about it. Time for some self-reflection? That's not very green.

View on HN

Crypto energy requirements go up as the currency gets more traction.

TFA shows that groq is many times faster than GPT-4. Up to 18x groq claims. Faster means less energy. So I think it's just a matter of time until these things become ridiculously power efficient (eg run on phones in sub second times)

How does faster mean less energy? Thats only true if you’re running faster on the same hardware…

Presumably. Less time the giant chip has to draw power for computation. The point is that everyone's interested in making AI power efficient, while crypto's proof of work is a competition for more power burned hashing and throwing away the result.

I think they are talking about the case where, hypothetically, there is a 10x increase in speed but only 2x increase in power consumption

I’m just pointing out that this is not a given…

Bitcoin energy requirements will be cut in half in a few days..

It's still a monstrosity compared to a traditional parser. You can even be fancy and use complex parsers that backtrack and can deal with mildly context-sensitive languages (as required for HTML, XML, and many programmin languages), and you'd still be more efficient.

This is a valid point, but we are still in the early stages of AI/LLMs, so one would expect the speed and efficiency to improve drastically (perhaps accuracy too) over the coming years.

At least AI & LLMs have large scale practical applications as opposed to crypto (IMO).

AI is a lot older than blockchain. There were full-fledged neural networks in the 40s and the perceptron was implemented in hardware in the 50s.

It's also interesting to think that IBM released an 8-trillion parameter model back in the 1980s [0]. Granted it was an n-gram model so it's not exactly an apples-to-apples comparison with today's models, but still, quite crazy to think about.

[0]: https://aclanthology.org/J92-4003.pdf

Interesting to see Robert Mercer the former CEO of Renaissance Technology is one of the authors on that paper. He is a former IBMer. If his name is unfamiliar he is a reclusive character who was a major funder of Breitbart, Cambridge Analytica and the Republican candidate in the 2016 presidential election.

I wouldn't call the early McCulloch & Pitts work quite "full-fledged". Also backpropagation, essential for multi level perceptrons was not a thing until 1980s.

Backprop is just applied calculus. People simply didn't think about using it for neuronal networks yet.

It was thought of as early as in 1960s by Rosenblatt but he did not come up with a practical implementation at the time. Lotsa things look obvious in hindsight.

You're partially right. It's obvious that the solution is to combine traditional programming with AI, using traditional programming wherever possible because it's greener. Assuming you want things to turn out well in every possible future scenario, your decisions only matter if AGI isn't right around the corner. So assume it isn't right around the corner. Then there's going to be some interesting combining-together of manual human intervention, traditional software, and AI. We'll need to charge more for some uses of electricity, to incentivise turning AI into traditional software wherever possible.

Crypto is nearly pure waste.

> We'll need to charge more for some uses of electricity, to incentivise turning AI into traditional software wherever possible.

I don't understand this. This adds bureaucracy and I don't see why different uses need to be charged differently if they all use energy the same.

In other words, if energy costs X per unit, and an inefficient (AI) software takes 30 units and an efficient (traditional) software takes 10 units, then it is already cheaper to run the efficient software, and thus people are already incentivised to do so. There's no need to charge differently. If one day AI turns out to only need 5 units, turning more efficient, then just charge them for 5X. People will gravitate towards the new, efficient AI software naturally then.

Websites will never be fast, will they? Even with 1000x more compute than now they will just perform everything in LLM calls and stuff are just as slow as now.

It would take microseconds after a complete program was written by a human?

It no longer requires an expert human

And if this use case hit any kind of scale. We’d just have an llm generate a parser and be back to microseconds.

This was just a blog to generate traffic on the site. Not to showcase some new use case for an llm.

Any amount of energy spent useful work is vastly superior than whatever “POW” crypto burn does.

>For all the posturing and forest fire hate on HN, it’s now socially acceptable to run a toy steam engine to power a model car? Not very green of you.

It's almost a fallacy at this point to declare something bad simply because of the existence of carbon emissions, without first comparing the benefits of what is being produced, and the alternative tradeoffs.

To be fair to GP, they did compare it to alternatives (dumb HTML parsing), but failed to consider versatile HTML parsing or other uses for Groq LLM.

While you are not wrong, crypto is not what this is being compared with.

While energy remains cheap and human minds remain expensive, it always makes sense to use AI to reduce human effort.

If one cares about the environment, a carbon cap/tax is what you should campaign for. Then carbon-based energy sources will be curtailled, energy costs will go up, and AI like this will be encouraged to become more energy efficient or other methods used instead.

It is a nice idea in principle but ends up being a political tool and a tariff on goods and services of your own country. A global and corruption free carbon tax might work but that is impossible to achieve.

The only way it's gonna work is if a bunch of countries get together, agree a carbon cap/tax, and then tell other countries that they need to join the scheme if they want to trade goods with the group.

One way to combat corruption is to ask an international panel of experts to assess how many extra emissions came from non-official sources in each country and reduce next years cap by that amount. Then countries have an incentive to stamp out corruption.

I don't know. Corruption gets easier with increased centralization. I think a far better approach is to innovate our way out of it. If carbon free energy sources are less expensive then the problem will solve itself essentially. A global carbon tax will enviably extract some portion of global GDP from corruption. That money would likely be better spent in other ways.

Basically, carbon tax is the accountant's solution, innovation is the engineer's.

carbon-free will take a really long time to be cheaper.

As soon as demand for oil starts to drop, so will oil prices, and I suspect they could go down by a factor of 10 or more and oil-rich nations would still think it worthwhile to exploit at least some reserves.

Because crypto has very little real world use.

There is a lot of business value happening in the AI space and its only going to get better.

One is actually useful day to day though.

What a ridiculous complaint. Energy efficiency won't remain static, and even if it were, it's not up to you to decide how to best leverage the available electricity.

> it's not up to you to decide

Unless you live in a dictatorship it's definitely up to us to decide... Otherwise you leave your voice to the top 0.0001% business owners and expect them to work for your good and not for their own interests

Also read about the rebound effect. Planes are twice as efficient as they were 100 years ago yet they pollute infinitely more as a whole.

There is nothing ridiculous about the comment you're replying to

Yes you are right and the future is dependent on innovation and using more electricity with a large percentage of it coming form renewable sources. I don't want to go live on the farm myself.

Ok, then let's start by getting away with all the wasteful animal farming.

AND it's not even reliable.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com