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Cars free me from the drudgery of walking to places but I still ride my bike to stay fit. You are an energy optimization machine and lots of your biology is use it or lose it.

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Cars are actually a good analogy. They seem helpful in a lot of ways, and they can be, but ultimately they're harmful to your health, other's health, environment, and the design and ability to construct places and locations free of drudgery.

Motorized vehicles enable more access to fresher food, cheaper housing, and more material prosperity. They are genuinely helpful, just like LLMs can do some things insanely good (50x cheaper at categorizing tweets).

They're also cooking the Amazon lol

The power cost of inference and training is coming down exponentially. Deepmind v3 was trained for a tenth of what it cost to train equivalent performing models a few months earlier.

This is like saying digital electronic computers would never be economically and environmentally feasible if we had extrapolated out from the Z3 and ENIAC.

I think we should reserve judgement on the topic.

Estimates on the energy cost of ChatGPT-o3 per request (never mind training) are scary.

I look at it more like a lever or pulley. I'm still going to get a good workout exerting the maximum that I can. But wow can I lift a lot more.

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