In a press conference this week on New York City’s $12 billion budget gap, Mayor Zohran Mamdani zeroed in on the previous administration’s artificial intelligence chatbot as one of “a number of different things we’re going to pursue for savings.”

  • Dremor@lemmy.world
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    21 days ago

    A model being local doesn’t make it magically better than cloud based ones. Especially since your local hardware may not be as optimized as professional hardware.

    And I say that as a local AI user.

    The way to make it less harmful mainly comes from external factors :

    • The origin of the electricity (renewable)
    • Shift consumption to a time of low demand (or use a residential battery)
    • Use specific hardware for specific tasks (use less energy per token)
    • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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      21 days ago

      Yeah, I tend to do a bench test on my Laptop to heat myself up. It’s really neat!

      No, I don’t have a gaming rig. It’s not going above 65W, and I actually have an ideological reason I want to switch to solar power too.

      Soon, my local AI’s will be solar powered as well, and offline.

      Sadly, so far I have the capability to only charge my Tablet and phone, which are actually decent for AI in their own right.

      • Dremor@lemmy.world
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        21 days ago

        Better than a benchmark, you should try Boinc or Folding@Home.

        Heating by science.

        • WorldsDumbestMan@lemmy.today
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          21 days ago

          There was this citizen science project where few tried to manually fold proteins. Unfortunately, the computer was better than us at it, and we didn’t contribute much. I sucked. However, I contributed my PC resources for a rather short while to some random cancer research project. I don’t remember the details, I figured it was a better use of idle computer time than mining bitcoins.

          Boy was I wrong.