Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights. In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues in drier parts of the world.

Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards. Trying to achieve one climate goal of limiting our dependence on fossil fuels can compromise another goal, of ensuring everyone has a safe and accessible water supply.

Moreover, when significant energy resources are allocated to tech-related endeavours, it can lead to energy shortages for essential needs such as residential power supply. Recent data from the UK shows that the country’s outdated electricity network is holding back affordable housing projects.

In other words, policy needs to be designed not to pick sectors or technologies as “winners”, but to pick the willing by providing support that is conditional on companies moving in the right direction. Making disclosure of environmental practices and impacts a condition for government support could ensure greater transparency and accountability.

  • uis@lemm.ee
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    Large language models such as ChatGPT are some of the most energy-guzzling technologies of all. Research suggests, for instance, that about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3 at Microsoft’s data facilities.

    This metric doesn’t say anything.

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    But it’s okay, because now we can get wrong answers faster than ever, and we’ve taken human creativity and joy out of art.

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    if it’s not crypto miners with GPUs it’s AI, these narratives never really connect well with reality. /u/0ptimal wrote a great comment on this post: https://alexandrite.app/lemmy.world/comment/10355707

    To no surprise, the other comments are full of laypeople that feel they understand the entire field they have never studied well enough to preach to others about just how useless and terrible it is, who also know nothing about the subject.

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      But now I know that I can jump off the Golden Gate bridge to cure my depression.

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        The golden gate bridge is so far away from me. I don’t know what to do to cure depression. :(

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      That is an absurd reduction of reality, blatant illustration of dunning-kruger in relation to LLMs

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        Speak for yourself, loser. Repeating shit you heard an influencer say on Twitch is cringe.

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          Explain to me how we’re not or kindly go outside and play hide and go fuck yourself.

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              That’s cool, free will doesn’t exist, whats going to happen is going to happen. I’ve accepted that, so I might die poor, but you’re the only one here with a chance of dying truly unhappy.

              You know what’s funny? What negative prompts you’d have to give an LLM to get it to respond the way you do.

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                You were more entertaining when you just repeated dumb lines from your favourite influencers

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          You are insulting someone simply because they didn’t go along with your strawman? Intelligence is in short supply these days.

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    AI -and cryptocurrencies- use massive amounts of energy and the only value they produce is wealth. We don’t get correct, reliable and efficient results with AI, and we don’t get a really useful currency but a speculatory asset with cryptocurrencies. We are speeding into a climate disaster out of pure greed.

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      We get it, you don’t know what you’re talking about.

      God, I love it when laypeople feel they understand the entire field they have never studied and are oh-so-confident to preach to others who also know nothing about the subject.

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      This is absolutely false. GitHub Copilot (and it’s competitors) alone are already actively helping and assisting virtually every software developer around the world, and highly structured coding languages are just the easiest lowest hanging fruit.

      Yes we are heading to a climate disaster because of greed, but that has nothing to do with AI.

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        I think you are vastly over estimating how many developers are using GitHub Copilot.

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          That’s bs now and will only become more so with time.

          This was posted two days ago: https://stackoverflow.blog/2024/05/29/developers-get-by-with-a-little-help-from-ai-stack-overflow-knows-code-assistant-pulse-survey-results/

          We found that most of those using code assistant tools report that these assistants are satisfying and easy to use and a majority (but not all) are on teams where half or more of their coworkers are using them, too. These tools may not always be answering queries accurately or solving contextual or overly specific problems, but for those that are adopting these tools into their workflow, code assistants offer a way to increase the quality of time spent working.

          The majority of respondents (76%) let us know they are using or are planning to use AI code assistants. Some roles use these tools more than others amongst professional developers: Academic researchers (87%), AI developers (76%), frontend developers (75%), mobile developers (60%), and data scientists (67%) currently use code assistants the most. Other roles indicated they are using code assistants (or planning to) much less than average: data/business analysts (29%), desktop developers (39%), data engineers (39%), and embedded developers (42%). The nature of these tools lend themselves to work well when trained well; a tool such as GitHub Copilot that is trained on publicly available code most likely will be good at JavaScript for frontend developers and not so good with enterprise and proprietary code scenarios that business analysts and desktop developers face regularly.

          But go ahead, speak for the whole goddamn industry, we’re totally not using AI or AI code-assist!!!

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        I don’t want to doxx myself or blow my own horn. The programming I do, and many developers do, is not something ChatGPT or Bing AI or whatever it is called can do.

        At best, it is a glorified search engine that can find code snippets and read -but not understand- documentation. Saves you some time but it can’t think and it can’t solve a problem it hasn’t seen before, something programmers often have to do a lot.

      • Landless2029@lemmy.world
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        what are the competitors to github’s copilot? I tried it for personal and really like it but can’t use it for work due to IP leak risks.

        I’m hoping there is a self hosted option for it.

        Edit: found one. TabbyML

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          If capitalism is a forest fire, than the industrial revolution was like hitting a cache of kerosene, computers were like hitting a cache of gasoline, and AI is like hitting a smaller pile of gasoline. Yes it will accelerate things, but that’s it. It’s not causing any new effects we haven’t already seen.

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    Dunno about Microsoft and AWS but AFAIK Google has been powering all their data centers with “renewables” for a very long time.

    I’m pretty sure many of these data centers have dedicated power sources due to the high consumption, and opt for things like hydroelectric due to cost per watt.

    And at least there’s a serious end product delivered, unlike crypto mining which wastes trillions of hashes to make a secure transactional network.

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      At least here in the Netherlands, there was a lot of commotion because a data centre tried to buy a windmill park meant to power households as their dedicated power source

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      That’s mainly just bitcoin at this point. Other top network use proof of stake. Dont throw the baby out with the bath water.

      Also, I’d reckon a secure transactional network is a serious end product. But I understand most here don’t share the same freedom of money philosophical views as the cypherpunks.

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        But it’s not secure. At least not in any way more secure than your password is, or that coin that’s in your jacket pocket. The whole security aspect is just another strawman.

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          Huh? Why would you think this?! I’d love to explore this line of thought with you.

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            FAR more secure. Not just employee fraud but bank failure, theft, wire fraud, govt seizure, etc. so many ways for fiat in a bank to go poof.

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      Microsoft pledged to be carbon neutral by 2030. Remains to be seen how much greenwashing that is versus actually doing things.

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        I, too, pledge to be carbon neutral by 2030.

        If I cannot meet the criteria, I’ll just move the deadline. Easy peasy, squeeze the world out of resources lemon squeezy.

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      And the new material science discoceries etc should really help. Given that DeepMind used GNoME to find 2.2 million new crystals, including 380,000 stable materials. That’s kinda a big deal. That was November of last year. Haha people have no idea how much this could help us. We fucked up but the light is shining and we need to run fast. I’m pretty sure, short this miraculous pace of discovery and compound returns, we will/would end up in a runaway climate feedback loop. IPCC has been throwing out their best models because they don’t like the implications that it is going faster than expected and the climate sensitivity may be worse than expected.

      People think AI is gonna cook us? The sun would like to make a bet.

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        The only way to beat time is via simulation. We do it all the time. Otherwise you couldn’t drive a car! You maybe “imagine” / “model” the environment / drivers, the physics, etc.

        Without intelligence we are doomed because inaction. We had the technology but apathy and dental won, and now it’s a race against entropy/time.

        Basically moonshot or die trying

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    This is what pisses me off so much about the climate crisis. People tell me not to use my car, but then microsoft just randomly blow out 30% more co2 for AI

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      Cars collectively emit far more carbon than ChatGPT, and ChatGPT is only going to get more optimized from here.

      Ultimately the answer should be in a heavy carbon tax, rather than having a divine ruler try and pick and choose where it’s worth it to spend carbon.

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        Part of why right wing politics are becoming so popular again is that so many politicians shove the financial responsibility of cutting carbon onto the normal population. My point is that it feels useless to cut my own emission as long as massive corporations can just randomly emitt way more without consequence. Also, microsoft use electricity for more that just chatgpt.

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          Look up how much pollution is made from the massive shipping boats when they get into international waters and start burning bilge oil.

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          You know that Microsoft doesn’t just sit there and burn electricity for fun right?

          Microsoft data centers are doing what consumers ask them to do. They are burning data at the request of users, no different than your personal PC.

          Actually the main difference is that he computers in their data centers are far more energy efficient than your PC.

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              So then you realize that it’s not Microsoft burning that electricity, but individual consumers?

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                I’d still blame microsoft for shoving AI down peoples throats. Search something on bing (or google for that matter) and you get an AI response, even if you don’t want it. It’s the choice of these corporations.

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                  You’re really trying yourself in knots to try and blame the big bad corpos and no one else.

                  Yes they are shoving it in people’s faces, and when the average person uses their default browser with a default search engine and searches on Bing and it uses AI in addition to a search index they are to blame, but every single user who intentionally seeks out ChatGPT or Copilot is also to blame.

                  It’s a new technology, people are going to use it and burn energy with it and then eventually we will make a more efficient version of it as it matures, similar to everything else, including traditional search.

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      We need better carbon (and equivalents) accounting, and knowledge of equivalents.

      E.g. Turning 60 people vegetarian = having 1 baby.

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    This isn’t a good situation, but I also don’t like the idea that people should be banned from using energy how they want to. One could also make the case that video games or vibrators are not “valuable” uses of energy, but if the user paid for it, they should be allowed to use it.

    Instead of moralizing we should enact a tax on carbon (like we have in Canada) equal to the amount of money it would take to remove that carbon. AI and crypto (& xboxes, vibrators, etc) would still exist, but only at levels where they are profitable in this environment.

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    Me: ChatGPT, can you create a system that’s capable of powering your systems in a environmentally sustainable way?

    ChatGPT: THERE IS INSUFFICIENT DATA FOR A MEANINGFUL ANSWER.

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      I mean ChatGPT can’t do it but humans can and are… Why do you think Microsoft / Apple / Google are all introducing NPU / AI coprocessing chips?

      The new ARM powered surface laptops that consume like 30W of power are more capable of running an AI model than my gaming PC from 2 years ago that consumes ~300W of power.

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    The ugly truth behind journalist: broke English majors are guzzling resources at planet-eating rates

    By age of 21 most journalist have produced 336 metric tons of Co2 and and 20 000 lbs of waste just to produce stacks of advertorials, mild propaganda and personal vendettas leaving a trail of blog posts across multiple servers.

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    There are layers of wrong and stupid to this article.

    Despite its name, the infrastructure used by the “cloud” accounts for more global greenhouse emissions than commercial flights.

    “The cloud” accounts for something like 80% of the internet across the entire planet. I’d be curious what 80% of transportation infrastructure would end being in comparison… no takers? We’re only comparing to (some) flights instead of, I dunno, the vast bulk of our fossil fuel powered transport infra?

    In 2018, for instance, the 5bn YouTube hits for the viral song Despacito used the same amount of energy it would take to heat 40,000 US homes annually.

    Oh no, the most popular song in the world used the same amount of energy as 40k homes in the US. The US probably has something in the range of a hundred million homes. The efficiency of computing equipment increases by a sizable percentage every single year, with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today. So why aren’t we talking about, say, heat pumps for those homes? You know, since they’re still using the same amount of energy they did in 2018?

    …about 700,000 litres of water could have been used to cool the machines that trained ChatGPT-3… Additionally, as these companies aim to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels, they may opt to base their datacentres in regions with cheaper electricity, such as the southern US, potentially exacerbating water consumption issues…

    What is this idiocy? You realize that a chip fab uses something to the tune of ten million gallons of water per day, right? Ten million. Per day. I’m not even looking at other industrial processes, which are almost undoubtedly worse (and recycle their water less than fabs) - but if you’re going to whine about the environmental impact of tech, maybe have a look at the manufacturing side of it.

    Furthermore, while minerals such as lithium and cobalt are most commonly associated with batteries in the motor sector, they are also crucial for the batteries used in datacentres. The extraction process often involves significant water usage and can lead to pollution, undermining water security. The extraction of these minerals are also often linked to human rights violations and poor labour standards.

    Man, we’re really grasping at straws here. More complaining about water usage, pollution, water security, labor standards, human rights violations… wait, were we talking about the costs of data centers or capitalism in general? Because I’m pretty sure these issues are endemic, across every industry, every country, maybe even our entire economic system. Something like a data center, which uses expensive equipment, likely has a lower impact of every single one of these measures than… I dunno… clothes? food? energy production? transport? Honestly guys, I’m struggling to think of an industry that has lower impact, help me out (genuine farm to table restaurants, maybe).

    There are things to complain about in computing. Crypto is (at least for the time being) a ponzi scheme built on wasting energy, social media has negative developmental/social effects, etc. But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion, and it feels like a distraction from the real issues on this front.

    In fact I’d go further and say its actively damaging to publish attack pieces like these. The last few years I didn’t drive to the DMV to turn in my paperwork, I did it over the internet. I don’t drive to work because I’m fully remote since the pandemic, cutting my gas/car usage by easily 90%. I don’t drive to blockbuster to pick out videos the way I remember growing up. The sheer amount of physical stuff we used to do to transmit information has been and is gradually all being transitioned to the internet - and this is a good thing. The future doesn’t have to be all bad, folks.

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        For comparison, a single hydraulically fractured oil well uses over 100 times as much water.

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      The reason the article compares to commercial flights is your everyday reader knows planes’ emissions are large. It’s a reference point so people can weight the ecological tradeoff.

      “I can emit this much by either (1) operating the global airline network, or (2) running cloud/LLMs.” It’s a good way to visualize the cost of cloud systems without just citing tons-of-CO2/yr.

      Downplaying that by insisting we look at the transportation industry as a whole doesn’t strike you as… a little silly? We know transport is expensive; It is moving tons of mass over hundreds of miles. The fact computer systems even get close is an indication of the sheer scale of energy being poured into them.

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      with the odds being good the same data could be served at 1/20th the cost today

      Gotta nitpick you there. According the Moore’s law (really more of a rule of thumb), the price of the silicon used to serve those videos should be 1/16 of what it is today. I’m not aware of any corresponding law that describes trends in energy consumption. It’s getting better for sure, but I’d be shocked if there was a 20x improvement in 6 years.

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      and recycle their water less than fabs

      Which is actually a very good idea economics-wise but fabs didn’t care much for the longest time because while crucial it’s still a minor part of their operating infrastructure. They had bigger fish to fry.

      The thing is if you clean a wafer with ultrapure water, the resulting waste water might have some nasty stuff in it… but tap water has more stuff in it, just not as nasty. They generally need to process the waste water to be environmentally safe, anyway, doesn’t take much to feed it back into the cycle and turn it into ultrapure, again.

      Side note in case you’re wondering what it’s like to drink that kind of water: It’s basically a novel way to burn your tongue. The osmotic pressure due to lack of minerals will burst cell walls but you’re not a microorganism so you’ll most likely be fine and the load on your overall mineral stores is only marginally higher than when drinking ordinary water, we get the vast majority of our minerals from food.

      But the environmental impact of stuff like data centers… its just not a useful discussion,

      I’d say it is but more along the lines of feeding waste heat into district heating. Someone can shower with those CPU cycles.

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      Cmon, outside of ol’ Bitcoin, my freedom of money networks are a drop in the bucket.

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    Yes it does, and wait until you hear about literally every other industry.

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        You are on lemmy, a decentralized and open platform. Cryptos are to money what lemmy is to their centralized and proprietary counterpart.

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            AI evangelists act like it’s already perfect and anybody who dares question the church of LLM is declared a Luddite.

            I don’t think that’s the case, though. The only people I see actively “evangelizing” LLMs are either companies looking for investors or “influencers” looking for attention by tapping on people’s insecurities.

            Most people just either find it useful for some specific use cases or just don’t care. And a large part actually hate on it.

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              You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.

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                You’re doing it right now. You’re criticizing that user for saying it’s okay to talk about AI’s failures. You’re the example, evangelizing and shilling. My advice: STFU.

                It seems like you missed the memo on reading comprehension. I literally quoted the exact part I’m criticizing, which clearly isn’t what you claimed.

                And being overly emotional and telling people to STFU online? That’s a masterclass in civility right there.

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                  Ohmahgosh you’re so right, I see it now, you telling them they were wrong to criticize AI was in fact the correct take all along. You’ve shown me the way, All Hail AI. ALL HAIL AI.

                  What a fucking shill.

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          1 month ago

          That’s wrong, I buy drugs online with cryptocurrencies all the time to this day and have done it long before the normies showed up and turned it into a mostly financial scam.

          Evading the man and LEOs when the law ain’t right is my god-given right and I’m thankful to be born in the age of onions and crypto.

          • Turun@feddit.de
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            1 month ago

            Crypto is basically cash for online transactions. Pretty niche, but cool and definitely in demand for some situations.

            Just how in the real world you’re shit outta luck if you lose your wallet. Or if you give someone money, but they laugh you in the face you can either cut your losses or try your luck in a fist fight. It’s the same with crypto.

            With banks you have a separate authority that can handle all these cases, which is desirable in 99% of all transactions.

            Unfortunately it’s volatile af, and the most popular crypto currency (Bitcoin)has untenable transaction costs and transaction limitations (10 transactions per second, globally - what a stupid design decision)

            • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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              1 month ago

              If you could hold your breath long enough to get out of your first world bubble, you would be able to see that bitcoin is massively popular amongst people who need ways to escape their collapsing fiat currencies. It is hilarious how spoiled people who happen to be born in countries where everything is taken care of them are too thick and compationless to even consider that other people have actual problems.

                • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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                  1 month ago

                  I’m lucky enough to be from a country with a relatively stable fiat currency, although it is unclear how much longer that will be the case. In order to protect the value I’ve gained from my work, I do hold some of it in Bitcoin. I also use it to support charitable efforts in less fortunate countries. It is an excellent way to transfer value to exactly who I want to transfer it to without giving massive fees to banks and other companies that facilitate the transfer of funds.

                  A big thing to remember is that whenever you hold any countries currency, you are basically giving them a blank check to your energy. You are telling them that they can have as much of the value that you have saved that they want. When they print more money, they are taking that value directly from you. It is one thing to pay taxes on income, property, and goods purchased and sold, but on top of that, they have the ability to extract extra value from you just by running their printers. The more you believe that a government represents you and has your best wishes at heart, the more you should be holding their currency.

            • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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              1 month ago

              Good, I hate cryptobros and aibros and artbros and luddites and industrialists and environmentalists, but I love communal living, hate cities, love AI (and AI art), love art (and craft of said art), love nature & the environment and animals, hate vegans, and love science and industry etc.

              At this point I have such an ultra-niche hyper-specific take on this (and almost everything) that I feel completely out of touch with most people which seem at first glance to navigate mostly by vibes and emotions of how they feel about a vague aesthetic sense of modernity that day.

      • Lvxferre@mander.xyz
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        1 month ago

        That other poster is using a disingenuous debate tactic called “whataboutism”. Basically shifting the focus from what’s being criticised (AI resource consumption) to something else (other industries).

        Your comparison with evangelists is spot on. In my teen years I used to debate with creationists quite a bit; they were always

        • oversimplifying complex matters
        • showing blatant lack of reading comprehension, and distorting/lying what others say
        • vomiting certainty on things that they assumed, and re-eating their own vomit
        • showing complete inability to take context into account when interpreting what others say
        • chain-gunning fallacies
        • “I’m not religious, but…”

        always to back up something as idiotic as “the world is 6kyo! Evolution is a lie!”.

        Does it ring any bell for people who discuss with AI evangelists? For me, all of them.

        (Sorry bolexforsoup for the tone - it is not geared towards you.)

      • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        Go on benefiting from the people who actually do stuff while simultaneously whining about it. You’ve been using AI for 20 years, you’re just too thick to know about it. There are millions of people in 2nd and 3rd world countries who have had their lives massively improved thanks to bitcoin, you’re just too spoiled and naive and to give a shit about them. Climb down off your soap box and go read something beyond the headline.

      • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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        1 month ago

        “aI AnD cRyPtO aRe ThE sAmE bRo”

        You know that your take that they both must suck in the exact same ways just because tech bros get hyped about them, is literally just as shallow, surface level, and uninformed as most tech bros?

        Like yeah man, tech hype cycles suck. But you know what else was once a tech hype cycle? Computers, the internet, smartphones. Sometimes they are legitimate, sometimes not.

        AI is solving an entirely new class of problem that computers have been literally unable to solve for their entire existence. Crypto was solving the problem of making a database without a single admin. One of those is a lot more important and foundational than the other.

        On top of that, crypto algorithms are fundamentally based on “proof of work”, i.e. literally wasting more energy than other miners in the network is a fundamental part of how their algorithm functions. Meaning that with crypto there is basically no value prop to society and it inherently tries to waste energy, neither is the case for AI.

        Plus guess how much energy everyone streaming 4K video would take if we were all doing it on CPUs and unoptimized GPUs?

        Orders of magnitude more power than every AI model put together.

        But guess what? Instead we invented 4k decoding chips that are optimized to redner 4k signals at the hardware level so that they don’t use much power, and now every $30 fire stick can decode a 4k signal on a 5V usb power supply.

        That’s also where we’re at with the first Neural Processing Units only just hitting the market now.

          • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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            1 month ago

            Sure, uninformed tech hypebois suck in the same way, but the arguments around crypto and AI, especially around energy usage, are fundamentally not the same.

              • masterspace@lemmy.ca
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                1 month ago

                Someone posted a shitty article about AI and power usage, someone pointed out that literally every industry uses a ton of power but AI gets clicks, you said AI and Crypto bros are the same.

                If you don’t mean to imply that the counter arguments around AI and Crypto in terms of energy use are the same then write better given the context of the conversation.

                And posting another shitty article that just talks about power usage going up across literally all types of industry, including just normal data centers and manufacturing plants, and then vaguely talking about chatGPT’s power usage compared to Google search to try and make it sound like those things are connected, is not having a serious discussion about it.

                It’s skimming a clickbait headline of a clickbait article and regurgitating the implication in it like it’s a fact.

      • technocrit@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        Cryptos have drastically reduced their energy consumption through technological improvements.

        That’s why nobody complains about crypto energy consumption anymore. It’s just bitcoin.

        But these LLMs just need more and more with no end in sight.

        • AIhasUse@lemmy.world
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          1 month ago

          Funny how 99.99% of cryptos shrivel up and die while bitcoin continues to serve people all over the world and is constantly becoming more and more popular. Maybe if you lived with, or even gave a shit about, people in below average wealth countries you would understand why Bitcoin is so useful to them.

      • paf0@lemmy.world
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        1 month ago

        To be fair, crypto will never stand a chance against fiat as a means for payments because governments ensure that it’s complicated to tax. However, the underlying blockchain technology remains very interesting to me as a means of getting around middlemen companies.

      • LainTrain@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        1 month ago

        “The world is complicated and scary! I don’t understand it so it must be bad! M-muh planet farting cows evil industry fuck the disabled/sick/queer!” - What luddites actually believe.

        Anprims/eco-fashes begone. If the planet was destroyed for the betterment of conditions for the proletariat today and future alike there’d be literally no issue, it’s just some rock lol, AI is far more important. Also brutalism and soviet blocs are the best architectural styles, everything else is bourgeois cringe.