Why are AI products being shipped so aggressively despite being so inefficient? Is code autocompletion and generating random images really worth so much electricity? Shouldn’t we wait until the research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first?
Edit: " Shouldn’t we wait until the research has created an efficient architecture that is easily scalable first?"
Who is "we"? If I think I can offer a product that uses AI and after paying API requests to OpenAI I can turn a profit, I'll build it. API requests will only get cheaper, but why should I wait for that if I can turn a profit now?
Perhaps it would be better for it to be efficient because it uses less energy and in general is a good thing to do for the world. I understand there aren't financial incentives around that so it's probably difficult for you to agree with.
Edit: It seems simply suggesting we do better is enough for people to lose their minds.
Governments of any shape are unable to accurately pick which industry to allow or prevent. Even harder would be creating legislation that carves out specific industry.
You can tax the externalities of the use of electricity. Please don’t create pandering comments with zero substance.
I don’t like bitcoin but who am I to tell people what to spend money on.
i would say that some gov'ts in the world does do this - famously the chinese CCP.
They dictate by providing state funding for industries they deem important (for whatever reason - geopolitically strategic, military, or welfare, etc). Whether it's the most "efficient" form of capital allocation is irrelevant (for them).
The people do not have a say, and in fact, cannot be doing any form of criticism - they may have feedback, but only in so far as the party allows said feedback. It's implicit that the CCP is picking for the "greater good" - but who is the judge of that? CCP itself is!
So by an act of tautology, they are doing it most efficiently!
With the greatest housing bubble has ever seen, and a deflationary spiral around the corner.
Now that's a laudable mindset.
Human idiocy driven extinction
When it comes to energy use, I don't believe anyone should have the power to say what should be allowed or not. That will stifle innovation. For every innovation there must have been thousands if not more failures.
People are funny on this forum, when it was Bitcoin it was the devil and now it’s helping us complete our lines of code it’s ok to require a nuclear power plant to run such a system? I guess whatever benefits the individual is ok ? Silicone valley types are funny too because it was all about developing fusion to save humanity now it’s about developing fusion to cat gifs?
These products need to be taxed to price in these externalities we can’t keep this up, it’s ridiculous.
The negative externality you are worried about isn't AI, but pollution/carbon emissions. Tax pollution instead of deciding for other people what use case is worth it.
Edit: To be clear, I am all for this. I'd love to see a massive(!) carbon tax.
The world isn't static. Electricity is fungible, it doesn't matter what it goes to.
By contrast, the ai we have today is the worst ai it will ever be. Quality will go up with time, and price will go down, as incentives drive the development of better, cheaper models.
Algorithmic improvements are coming quickly in generative ml. We're still in very early days.
Machine learning has utility, not just in theory but to plenty of people, including me. It has helped me do my job faster.
You can put tax on energy from carbon, fine. There’s no justification for taxing energy intensive things by themselves because you don’t like using energy. Human energy usage is and should be growing exponentially (and not an S curve) besides occasional pauses when efficiencies are found (like LED lighting using something like 90% less energy than incandescent).
Fossil fuels are clearly going away anyway, not because of ideals either, solar is just way cheaper now.
You've somehow missed all the "enshitification" processes Cory Doctorow and others have been documenting?
"Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die. I call this enshittification."
OpenAI (et al.) are all deeply in the "First, they are good to their users" stage of their business plan, but they WILL. NOT. STAY. THERE. Whatever product relying on OpenAI you can offer/build/grow into a business, sooner or later you're going to be squeezed for every cent in profit, in the same way as companies who were convinced Facebook was a great alternative to running their own web presence are these days - having to pay to ensure content that people who've like and subscribed to their pages end up seeing anything they post.
Your $20 subscription is not even close to covering electricity costs - never mind covering capitalisation costs for $1.6 billion data centres with another $1.6 billion dollars worth of GPUs to put in them. (Think about it. Even if that 3.2 billion dollar datacenter was funded borrowing at only 1% - you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans.)
I read about it, but don't believe it's a new law now that affects everything with no exceptions. Even is OpenAI wants to go from explore and expand into extract mode, open-source models are getting better every day and will create a decent floor.
> you'd need over 130,000 paying subscribers at $20/month just to cover the interest on the loans.
Maybe I live in a bubble (I definitely do), but that subscriber number seems quite reasonable and of course omits additional revenue from their APIs. Also if OpenAI wants to lose money, be my guest. I definitely enjoyed my VC-subsidized Uber rides of the past.
What's the course of action you recommend? Using nothing that's VC funded because Corey Doctorow says it will become shitty eventually?
Of course you wouldn't build a multi-billion dollar data center for a single application bringing in a pittance. But that's not what anyone is doing. Demand is high and data centers can be shared between many different companies.
as long as that resource is privately funded paid for, i don't care.
It's only a problem if this resource is taxpayer subsidized.
Yes. Very much so.
Some back of enveloping. The worldwide labor market is USD$70trillion. If you save 1% of the time of the worldwide labor market (that's quite reasonable for autocomplete etc right?) that's USD$700billion. A quick Google says the global electricity revenues are USD$255billion.
So if you have a way to save %1 of human labor it's economically worth tripling power generation to make use of it.
Modern AI is a whole lot more than just shitting out spam on the internet.
What mines?
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/cote-gold-mine-automa...
Canadian oil sands operation using Autonomous haul trucks.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z9w-mUoUsY
This mine in Arizona is in progress at this time.
https://im-mining.com/2023/09/15/freeport-says-bagdad-to-hav...
Rio Tinto says they have 130 autonomous units.
It is not surprising to me anymore the threads that get pulled to justify this insane hype, but what does shock me is that it's going on 8 months of the same very tired and thin arguments that get smaller and smaller in their claims the more questions you ask.
Our company buys it for us to "stay ahead", whether we use it or not, we're paying for it.
No, that is literally your claim combined with the claim of the original poster.
In your first post you claimed you "had" to use it. Now you say it's optional?
Still i think the point should stand no matter how precise we get here. The cost of labor absolutely dwarfs the cost of electricity. That was what i wanted to hit on while completely acknowledging the numbers are rough.
"In 2021, the global electricity transmission and distribution market generated some 255.6 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, up from 248.5 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year"
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1350454/forecast-electri....
Global electricity production is about 30 PWh per year and wholesale electricity costs are about $100 / MWh around the world. That’s about $3T. (Numbers are rough, don’t get pedantic)
A scalable architecture has a prerequisite of known product requirements and known implementation specs. Neither is true right now as this field is evolving at a crazy rate. Approaches like what Groq has are great for increasing efficiency, but at the cost of flexibility. Early on in any technology flexibility is imperative until product/market fit is established more clearly.
Also reducing this to autocompletion/generating random images really reduces what AI actually is. Those are two use cases for a very generalizable area.
When AWS can run their datacenter operations 20x more efficiently, which sounds "reasonable to me", they obviously will. Are you criticizing their customers? Or their customers' customers, the ones who like autocomplete? Literally the computer engineers, by whose work these applications have been enabled?
I think this is why you were perceived as calling for central planning. Ironically because you took aim at every level but the investors.
Growth is aggressive because of the huge investment in the sector currently. Literally because investors want a return. For better or worse there is nobody in the chain who interprets "worthwhile?" in the same sense, and the applications are not essentially relevant to the people in command.
Since you only reference autocompletion and image gen you obviously have not worked with using LLM in business processes. Is there a lot of hype? Certainly, but there is also a lot of value in the universe today for these models.
How do you even define "efficient architecture"? Nobody can define that.
What you’re implicitly suggesting is government allowing/banning certain uses of technology because they are deemed not worthy. That is an autocratic style of thinking.
If you abitrarily decice a metal processing factory is "worth it" while an AI datacenter isn't, then yes, it's planned economy.
And yeah, I know the governments already tax different industries differently. I think these policies are hardly justified and mostly "redistribution by lobbying".
https://locusmag.com/2023/12/commentary-cory-doctorow-what-k...
I'm not knowledgeble enough to judge, but am curious what people think.
How lucky we are to not have a centrally planned economy!