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Comment by stavros | Hacker News Reader

For me I think it's because the article appears biased. It's not just "we can't think of any problem it'd solve", it's "LLMs are bad and you should feel bad for liking them".

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I don't really have that feeling. The author says that LLMs make stuff up and are often wrong about non-widely known facts. They present hallucinations in a confident way, which makes them come across as liars. This is true. That is exactly what the most popular LLMs do.

They don't say that you should feel bad. The author simply says that the characteristics and unreliability of LLMs make them unfit to be implemented in the Vivaldi browser at this moment. They even close off the article with a positive sentiment about the future of the ML field. They don't burn any bridges there.

This doesn't sound biased to you?:

> While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

This is written in a way that makes it clear that the author does not like the energy usage aspects of LLMs.

But is he wrong?

Yes. Cars use more energy than LLMs, we don't mind those.

What does "a lot of energy" even mean? It's meaningless. Do they use too much energy for their usefulness? If they did, people wouldn't be using them.

> we don't mind those.

Like with LLMs, some of us do. But still there are places in the world where one is imprisoned without car. Which is not case with LLMs (yet).

Really hit the false equivalence nail on the head.

Cars enable long-distance travel, which in many parts of the world is now essential for survival, and often that is, ironically, a result of climate change.

LLMs do nothing to aid human survival. In a post-apocalyptic world, cars would be sought after for both transport and shelter, but nobody would give a care that we lost ChatGPT.

I'm not sure if cars use more energy than LLMs; huge "citation needed" there. But for the sake of argument, let's assume that they do.

Cars use more energy than LLMs because most of the world is built around requiring a car to get to places.

It's not that we don't mind it; quite the contrary, in fact, as we're always reminded of when the price of gas/petrol shoots upwards.

When the cost of living forces you to live 45 minutes away from your job by car because living within walking distance is astronomical, many folks are conditioned to want a house with a garage "for the kids" because apartments are "for the poor," and EVs, in their current state, are not financially feasible yet (though that is changing!), it's more that we're forced to tolerate it.

That's about the cost of energy, not about the consumption. If you don't think the cost of gas is worth it, you don't use a car. If you don't think the cost of electricity is worth it, you don't use an LLM. It's literally priced in.

I know people don't mind the cost relative to the value they're getting, because if they did, they wouldn't use LLMs.

Is the consumption priced into LLMs? Seems like the free ones are losing money, surely they aren't using no energy.

There aren't LLMs that are free to run.

Are you giving my post a fair reading or are you trying to state that there are no LLMs that cost nothing to run? I'm referencing the LLMs that let me query them at no cost... It'd seem as if you didn't read my post at all if you thought I was making reference to something else.

Yes, those LLMs still cost someone something.

I know, did you even read my post?? "Surely they aren't using no energy"

I don't know how clear you meant to be, but it's two sentences. You may want to elaborate, because all I can see in your post is you attacking a straw man of "I can use ChatGPT for free, therefore it must use no energy, which MAKES NO SENSE".

Are you autistic or something? You're lack of self-awareness is astounding.

Not sure if it’s biased, it’s a serious limitation of the technology. Some countries are already struggling with their energy grid and water demands as is.

I think it’s fair to ensure that you create something that isn’t subject to possible quotas in the future

... But I mean this is the case. What do you mean by 'biased' here? Is it 'biased' to mention bad things about a thing? To be truly unbiased, must one praise everything while glossing over the problems?

He went on a tangent about plagiarism, may as well disable the copy text feature in the browser.

Copying isn't plagiarism. Copying and then publishing the same thing is plagiarism.

Yes, I agree with you. The author made the point about LLM's facilitating plagiarism not me. My point is, if that is his argument, then copying is the same thing (which is ridiculous of course).

The plagiarism argument is not necessarily directed at the user of the browser. Ask yourself who is doing the publishing? And how would you cite the output of an LLM if you did publish the output?

I could ask the same for the copy function, don't see how this would ever be an issue?

Typically I'd cite to whatever it was I copied. I've never seen any kind of writing that sourced to the copy function. Have you?

And you can cite the LLM you've used, no different to citing a quote by a person.

And to answer your other question of how,

There's plenty of documentation on that directly from the source (openai, etc.) and elsewhere.

https://apastyle.apa.org/blog/how-to-cite-chatgpt

Precisely the point, you cite the model and that’s it. Even when these models are known in some cases to reproduce training text directly.

Humans are known to do that too?

I took it as more of a recognition of the downsides to LLM tech that the hype train tends to ignore, as well as the legal / moral / ethical gray areas that exist in both training those models and determining who is liable for what they output.

I don't know, this sounds weird:

> While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

How is that weird? Current energy consumption levels for LLMs are definitely problematic. That's not to say they can't improve, but at the moment it's definitely bad. The estimate of ongoing power consumption for Google's AI summary feature, if it was made available for every search result, is roughly equivalent to the consumption level of the entire country of Ireland. That's not awesome given most of the world is not powered by renewable energy sources.

Don't look at what it says, look at how it's written:

> While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

"Vast amounts of energy", "happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them", and then the random cryptocurrency reference to evoke all the bad stuff associated with those.

That's how a lot of folks write when they want to make a shorthand comparison and they trust their readers to understand what they're doing. The author is making a comparison of the current cost / benefit of LLM tech to the cost / benefit of Crypto. I don't necessarily agree with that comparison, but using an evocative writing style that can say quite a lot with very few words isn't a problem to me, especially given what this post is intended to convey.

Edit: I do think you're making a fair observation, I just feel there are a few reasons not to draw too strong of a conclusion from it

But they said:

> Despite all this, we feel that the field on machine learning in general remains an exciting one and may lead to features that are actually useful. In the future, we hope that it will allow us to bring good privacy-respecting features to our users with a focus on improving discoverability and accesibility.

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