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Comment by Banditoz | Hacker News Reader

> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet

There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)

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Probably because "making the world a better place" has been a trope used so much in the industry that it's made it to a TV show [1]. It's fine to be passionate about your job. It's fine to be paid well. You don't need to make us believe that you're mother Theresa on top of it.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso

What a gem of a TV show.

The don't need you to believe it. They just need themselves to hear say it.

You should stop using mother theresa this way.

Why?

Because this "saint" protected child molesters and collected megabucks for her poverty porn empire.

Its beyond trope, its a cult. https://people.howstuffworks.com/zizians.htm

Theil, Musk. Theyre all deluded that their Wealth and AI are saviors.

I’ll see your Art and raise you Life https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdrey6U5dU&pp=ygUSVGVjaGNydW5...

Reminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right?

I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.

Could US tech companies stop making the world a better place? Like how Airbnb made housing markets "better" and and Facebook made politics "better"? We barely have anything left as regular people as our new feudal lords capture everything they can.

airBnB made a very constrained market more efficient, the downsides are classic NIMBY factors. (which are important, but also nothing has been solved in cities that outlawed AirBnB.)

on the other hand Facebook made the internet hate machine more efficient :(

Why are NIMBY's to blame for hidden cleaning costs and hidden cameras in/near bathrooms?

because constrained supply leads to shitty solutions, and people spend their money on land rent instead of spending it on actual service (like making sure there are no hidden fees and cameras)

that said those are not new problems, and are not caused (nor exacerbated) by airBnB (likely the only tangentially significant factor is the decentralization of the hospitality industry thanks to online market places, and barriers to building more hotels, and of course people's preferences for renting something more unique, or simply something remote or secluded)

I saw this video where this gen z girl was saying she preferred working for boomers who just wanted her to show up on time, get her work done, and maybe stay a little late from time to time. She said it was exhausting working for millenials who wanted her to think her job was "saving the world."

The greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS.

Gavin Belson

Right? Like what an incredibly naive thing to think, that BG is going to contain power consumption lmao. OpenAI is always going to run their hardware hot. If BG frees up compute, a new workload will just fill it.

Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow?

Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.

They're going to grow either way. Those new workloads are going to be run

Ya, we know. Just humbling the author ;)

Sam Altman is pro-extinctionist like most of the surveillance capitalist ghouls. He literally invests in mind uploading companies and believes only the rich deserve to "survive" the singularity he believes it is his job to bring about.

Sure, humans going extinct is good for the planet, I guess, but be up front about what you are really supporting.

The HBO “Silicon Valley” series’ version of “making the world a better place by” nonsense. The blog article has fallen for the marketing of OpenAI. OpenAI is making the world a worse place by inflating the cost of RAM and even getting rid of RAM chip providers from the consumer space. Not to mention all the wasted power on compute for all sorts of meaningless tasks. At least with something like Claude I am saving months if not years of engineering effort and resources in a few hours.

Even a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all

I imagine there's a lot more to be gained than that via algorithmic improvements. But at least in the short term, the more you cut costs (and prices), the more usage will increase.

If you reduce energy consumption of training a new model by 25%, OpenAI will just buy more hardware and try to churn out a new model 25% faster. The total consumption will be exactly the same.

And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)

Not only that, every optimization gain makes it more attractive and creates even more demand, ie. effective energy usage will not decrease or stay the same - it will increase.

It's like with electric cars - if you make them more efficient, it doesn't mean less electricity will be used but more as it'll become more attractive, more people will switch to electric cars.

There's no gain to be had there at all. Any optimizations that reduce resource usage per output will be gobbled up by just making more output.

OpenAI released an open source model only because they are capped on growth right now by the amount if hardware they have. Improve resource efficiency and you better believe they'll just crank up use of said resources until they capped again.

Itll basically be the same treadmill as the "just one more lane" fallacy DoTs keep falling for.

For me, it just sounds like a ChatGPT-generated sentence. Especially, it likes to write sentences like "it's not just about... - it's about ..." and it first sounds legit, but it doesn't really make much sense when you start to think about it.

If you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.

Surely, this time Capitalisms external costs will be solved by me making as much money as possible.

The AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.

if you can be part of it and take a fat check!

Interesting disconnect from AI people saying AI is inevitable, but if we’re involved we can mitigate the harshest negative outcomes. Not sure that follows and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that.

It’s just a kind of lazy fatalistic nihilism. I worry about the world and think that these adult children who were told “no” during the pandemic have let their worst misanthropic tendencies flourish. They are indoctrinated in a belief that “you can just do things” for “you can just do things” sake.

Same thing was said about crypto.

Same thing is said about peddling drugs. Profit doesn't push ethical problems aside, though, or at least shouldn't.

At least nobody peddling drugs tried to convince anyone they're doing it to "save the planet".

If you trust what the executives of OpenAI and Anthropic say about their respective projects, its a die roll as to whether or not they will totally destroy the world. A theme of the last 5-10 years has been tech dropping the whitewashing of their reputation and embracing the idea that they what they are doing is incredibly sociopathic and still somehow cool (to them, I guess). Guess not everyone got the memo.

I stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…”

The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.

He interviewed everywhere and took the biggest offer. Good! Don’t piss on my face and tell me it’s raining.

It's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.

I apologize for the obscenity. I hope it's clear that I was trying to make a point in relation to the article.

Ignore the downvotes, this group is finicky.

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