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Why is everyone making this about a U.S. vs. China thing and not an LLMs suck and we should not be in favor of them anywhere thing?
We just don't follow the dogma "AI bad".
I use LLM regularly as a coding aid. And it works fine. Yesterday I had to put a math formula on code. My math knowledge is somehow rusty. So I just pasted the formula on the LLM, asked for an explanation and an example on how to put it in code. It worked perfectly, it was just right. I understood the formula and could proceed with the code.
The whole process took seconds. If I had to go down the rabbit hole of searching until I figured out the math formula by myself it could have maybe a couple of hours.
It's just a tool. Properly used it's useful.
And don't try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions. If regular people want to reduce their carbon footprint the first step is giving up vacations on far away places. I have run LLMs locally and the energy consumption is similar to gaming, so there's not a case to be made there, imho.
"ai bad" is obviously stupid.
Current LLM bad is very true. The method used to create is immoral, and are arguably illegal. In fact, some of the ai companies push to make what they did clearly illegal. How convenient...
And I hope you understand that using the LLM locally consuming the same amount as gaming is completely missing the point, right? The training and the required on-going training is what makes it so wasteful. That is like saying eating bananas in the winter in Sweden is not generating that much CO2 because the distance to the supermarket is not that far.
I don't believe in Intelectual Property. I'm actually very against it.
But if you believe in it for some reason there are models exclusively trained with open data. Spanish government recently released a model called ALIA, it was 100% done with open data, none of the data used for it was proprietary.
Training energy consumption is not a problem because it's made so sparsely. It's like complaining about animation movies because rendering takes months using a lot of power. It's an irrational argument. I don't buy it.
I am not necessarily got intellectual property but as long as they want to have IPs on their shit, they should respect everyone else's. That is what is immoral.
How is it made sparsely? The training time for e.g. chatgtp 4 was 4 months. Chatgtp 3.5 was released in November 2023, chatgtp 4 was released in March 2024. How many months are between that? Oh look at that... They train their ai 24/7. For chatgtp 4 training, they consumed 7200MWh. The average American household consumes a little less than 11000kWh per year. They consumed in 1/3 of the time, 654 times the energy of the average American household. So in a year, they consume around 2000 times the electricity of an average American household. That is just training. And that is just electricity. We don't even talk about the water. We are also ignoring that they are scaling up. So if they would which they didn't, use the same resources to train their next models.
Edit: sidenote, in 2024, chatgtp was projected to use 226.8 GWh.
2000 times, given your approximations as correct, the usage of a household for something that's used by millions, or potentially billions, of people it's not bad at all.
Probably comparable with 3d movies or many other industrial computer uses, like search indexers.
Yeah, but then they start "gaming"...
I just edited my comment, just no wonder you missed it.
In 2024, chatgtp was projected to use 226.8 GWh. You see, if people are "gaming" 24/7, it is quite wasteful.
Edit: just in case, it isn't obvious. The hardware needs to be produced. The data collected. And they are scaling up. So my point was that even if you do locally sometimes a little bit of LLM, there is more energy consumed then just the energy used for that 1 prompt.
Yeah it's ridiculous. GPT-4 serves billions of tokens every day so if you take that into account the cost per token is very very low.
IRL the first step to cutting emissions is what you're eating. Meat and animal products come with huge environmental costs and reducing how much animal products you consume can cut your footprint substantially.
There's some argument to be made there.
It depend where you live. If you live where I live a fully plant diet is mor environmentally damaging that omnivore diet. Because I would need to consume lots of plants that come from tropical environments to have a full diet, which means one of two things, import from far away or intensive irrigation in a dry environment.
While here farm animals can and are feed with local plants that do no need intensive irrigation.
Someday I shall make full calculations on this. But I'm not sure which option would give best carbon footprint. But I'm not that sure about full plant diet here.
The catch is there’s nowhere on earth where a plant diet has a higher carbon footprint unless you go out of your way to pursue foods from foreign sources that are resource intensive.
Realistically it will always take more to grow a chicken or a fish than grow a plant.
Try living on lucerne. Then, come again.
Realistic, as in real life, my grandparents had chickens "for free", as the residues from other plants that cannot be eaten by humans were the food of the chickens. So realistically trying to substitute the nutrients of those free chickens with plant based solutions would be a lot more expensive in all ways.
Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.
You didn't even read my statement.
If your answer is going to be again some variation of the dogma: "Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants." without considering that some plants used to feed animals are incredibly cheap to produce(and that humans cannot live on those planta), and that some animals live on human waste without even needing to plant food for them. Then don't even bother to reply.
I did read your statement And the costs of those feeds are not free. You are growing a feed plant to full maturity. Then you harvest said feed which has its own costs and then you give it to the animal which produces its own footprint.
Eating a different plant would have a lower cost than growing feed for an animal.
At this point I'm just going to say that you are very wrong about how agriculture and farming works, specially on a traditional environment.
And we haven't even entered in the great world of fishing, because you know, you don't need to grow crops to feed fish.
I have nothing against veganism, but I have a lot against misinformation. So I will end here my part of the conversation.
Yeah you have no idea what my background is si that’s not a safe bet. Im willing to believe you just don’t understand the carbon cycle based on your comments because you keep using the word “free”.
Fish farms have their own footprint and environmental problems as you still need to feed them and they still produce carbon and waste.
I think the issue here is you seem to be uncertain how the carbon costs are factored.
Hmm, even developing countries with local livestock and organic feed for them it’s still a lot better for the environment to be vegetarian or vegan, by far. It’s always more efficient to be more plant-based, rather than growing plants for animals to eat and then eating those animals.
I really need to do the calculations here.
Because growing plants for animals do not have, by far, the same cost that growing plants for humans.
My grandparents grew lucerne for livestock. And it really doesn't take much to grow. While crops for humans tend to take mucho more water and energy.
And for some animals, like chickens, you can just use residues from other crops.
I don't think it's that straightforward.
My grandparents used to live in an old village, with their farm, and that wasn't a very contaminating lifestyle. But if they would want to became began they would have needed to import goods from across the globe to have a healthy diet.
And don't try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions.
It's absurd that you even need to make this argument. The "carbon footprint" fallacy was created by big oil so we'll blame each other instead of pursuing pigouvian pollution taxes that would actually work.
I don't really think so.
Humans pollute. Evading individual responsibility in what we do it's irresponsible.
If you decide you want to "find yourself" travelling from US to India by plane. Not amount of taxes is going to fix the amount of CO2 emited by that plane.
(Sorry to be so verbose...)
For what it's worth, I worked on geared turbofans in the jet engine industry. They're more fuel efficient... but also more complicated, so most airlines opt for the simpler (more reliable) designs that use more fuel. This is similar to the problem with leaded fuel, which is still used in a handful of aircraft.
Airplanes could be much greener, there were once economies of scale to ship travel, and relying on altruism at scale just doesn't work at all anyways. Pigouvian taxes have a track record of success. So especially in the short term, the selfish person who decides to "find himself" would look at a high price of flying (which now includes external costs) and decide to not fly at all.
Relying on altruism (and possibly social pressure) isn't working, and that was always what big oil intended. Even homeless people are polluting above sustainable levels. We're giving each other purity tests instead of using very settled economics.
Changing your diet is more impactful than stopping international travel.
I'm going to fact check you, and you are not going to like it. But I hope you are able to learn instead of keeping yourself in a dogma.
Let's assume only one international flight per year. 12 hours. Times 2 as you have to come back . So 24 hours in a plane.
A plane emits 250 Kg of CO2 by passenger by hour. Total product is 250x24. Which equals 6 tons of CO2 emited by one international travel.
Now we go with diet. I only eat chicken and pork (beef is expensive). My country average is 100Kg of meat per person per year. Pork production takes 12 Kg of CO2 per Kg of meat. Chicken is 10, so I will average at 11 Kg. 11Kg of CO2 multiplies by 100Kg eaten makes 1.1 tons of CO2.
6 is greater than 1.1. about 6 times greater give it or take.
So my decision of not doing international travel saves 6 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere per travel. While if I would completely take the meat I eat from my diet I would only reduce 1.1 ton of CO2 per year.
Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148 https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html
I still think the numbers will be skewed heavily by those that travel internationally 0 times per year, but I think your math is accurate from what I can tell. Essentially, less air travel is good if you regularly travel, otherwise not so much.
How's the math turn out if people use alternate means of travel? Is traveling by boat still a thing?
"AI bad"
One thing that's frustrating to me is that everything is getting called AI now, even things that we used to call different things. And I'm not making some "um actually it isn't real AI" argument. When people just believe "AI bad" then it's just so much stuff.
Here's an example. Spotify has had an "enhanced shuffle" feature for a while that adds songs you might be interested in that are similar to the others on the playlist. Somebody said they don't use it because it's AI. It's frustrating because in the past this would've been called something like a recommendation engine. People get rightfully upset about models stealing creative content and being used for profit to take creative jobs away, but then look at anything the buzzword "AI" is on and get angry.
What are you doing to reduce your fresh water usage? You do know how much fresh water they waste, right?
The main issue is that the business folks are pushing it to be used way more than demand, as they see dollar signs if they can pull off a grift. If this or anything else pops the bubble, then the excessive footprint will subside, even as the technology persists at a more reasonable level.
For example, according to some report I saw OpenAI spent over a billion on ultimately failed attempts to train GPT5 that had to be scrapped. Essentially trying to brute force their way to better results when we have may have hit the limits of their approach. Investors tossed more billions their way to keep trying, but if it pops, that money is not available and they can't waste resources on this.
Similarly, with the pressure off Google might stop throwing every search at AI. For every person asking for help translating a formula to code, there's hundreds of people accidentally running a model due to Google search.
So the folks for whom it's sincerely useful might get their benefit with a more reasonable impact as the overuse subsides.
Do you? Also do you what are the actual issues on fresh water? Do you actually think cooling of some data center it's actually relevant? Because I really, data on hand, think it's not. It's just part of the dogma.
Stop trying to eat vegetables that need watering out of areas without a lot of rain, much better approach if you care about that. Eat what people on your area ate a few centuries ago if you want to be water sustainable.
Are you serious? Do you not know how they cool data centers?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions
That's nothing compared with intensive irrigation.
Having a diet proper to your region has a massively bigger impact on water than some cooling.
Also not every place on earth have fresh water issues. Some places have it some are pretty ok. Not using water in a place where it's plenty does nothing for people in a place where there is scarcity of fresh water.
I shall know as my country is pretty dry. Supercomputers, as the one used for our national AI, had had not visible impact on water supply.
You read all three of those links in four minutes?
Also, irrigation creates food, which people need to survive, while AI creates nothing that people need to survive, so that's a terrible comparison.
I'm already familiarized on industrial and computer usage of water. As I said, very little impact.
Not all food is needed to survive. Any vegan would probably give a better argument on this than me. But choice of food it's important. And choosing one food over another it's not a matter of survival but a matter of joy, a tertiary necessity.
Not to sound as a boomer, but if this is such a big worry for you better action may be stop eating avocados in a place where avocados don't naturally grow.
As I said, I live in a pretty dry place, where water cuts because of scarcity are common. Our very few super computers have not an impact on it. And supercomputers on china certainly are 100% irrelevant to our water scarcity issue.
I don't know why you keep bringing up luxuries like avocados. I don't remember the last time I ate an avocado, or a banana, or any exotic fruit for that matter.
I somehow feel like you won't listen to LLM criticism from me either, so it's a disingenuous argument.
Because it's the typical exotic fruit.
If you really don't eat anything that it's not native to your land good for you, you are one in a million.
What I mean is that the environment argument for being against AI doesn't really hold. It's just an excuse to justify the dogma.
Except AI centers are much much more impactful than any single decision a single person can make. Demanding perfection before assessing legitimacy of a complaint is also an excuse to justify dogma.
So many tedious tasks that I can do but dont want to, now I just say a paragraph and make minor correxitons
Same im not going back to not using it, im not good at this stuff but ai can fill in so many blanks, when installing stuff with github it can read instructions and follow them guiding me through the steps for more complex stuff, helping me launch and do stuff I woild never have thought of. Its opened me up to a lot of hobbies that id find too hard otherwise.
Which hobbies? That sounds interesting.
webdev, anything where you use github, houdini vexpressions, any time I have to use any expression or code something I don't know how to do.
So… AI taught me Spanish and made me fluent in a year. But I haven’t used it for tech stuff until I read this thread yesterday. I’m a Linux DABBLER. Like zero command line level but a huge user… daily driver but a fraud because I know so little. Anyway… my laptop ran into some problem and I knew I could spend hours parsing the issue in manuals and walkthroughs etc but I thought I would allow AI to walk me through … and it was great. Problem hasn’t been resolved but I learned a great deal. When another dabbling window opens, I’m on it.
Check out deepseekapi + cline vscode, just toss 5$ in deepseek and itll take forever to run out, i dont reccomend autoapprove tho, it doesn't work that well and you don't learn much using it lol, it is nice when going through templates, instead of editing manually and finding stuff you just tell the ai to ask you questions based on what can be customized.
I’ll have to check out deep seek and I’ll ask it what cline is.
I’ve been playing with NotebookLM— that’s staggering. Have you checked it out?
Well LLMs don't necessarily always suck, but they do suck compared to how much key parties are trying to shove then down our throats. If this pops the bubble by making it too cheap to be worth grifting over, then maybe a lot of the worst players and investors back off and no one cares if you use an LLM or not and they settle in to be used only to the extent people actually want to. We also move past people claiming the are way better than they are, or that they are always just on the cusp of something bigger, if the grifters lose motivation.
It will be nice if we could stop having headlines of "AGI by April".
Last I saw the promise was 'AGI real soon, but not before 2027", threading the needle between "we are going to have an advancement that will change the fundamentals of how the economy even works" and "but there's still time to get in and get the benefits of the current economy on our way to that breakthrough"
We'll have it on the first day of the month, I promise!
Because they need to protect their investment bubble. If that bursts before Deepseek is banned, a few people are going to lose a lot of money, and they sure as heck aren't gonna pay for it themselves.
I'm talking about everyone here in this discussion thread.
I mean I'm not saying the investment isn't emotional only.
Fucking exactly. Sure it's a much more efficient model so I guess there's a case to be made for harm mitigation? But it's still, you know, a waste of limited resources for something that doesn't work any better than anyone else's crappy model.