I also was having a similar thought, and think you wrote the answer I could not put my finger on.
Compilers are deterministic, AI is a stochastic process, it doesn't always converge exactly to the same answer. Here's the main difference
I don’t understand why this comment is downvoted. The options to reduce total energy consumption were always humans voluntarily accepting lower quality of life (not just among the top 1 million or 100 million, but top 2 billion at least, so this was obviously not going to happen), or reduce total number of humans.
It would make a difference even if we humans could just accept the same quality of life we already have, instead of building more and more, larger and larger data centers, for whatever the future of AI is. Computers have become so much more efficient than they used to be, and despite any joke we can make about Electron apps and such, those are still reductions in energy consumption, and some people are building such extravagant compute facilities that far outweigh the progress people have made on reducing energy costs.
Really hoping the work here ends up producing solutions that can be taken advantage of by cities and towns since the smaller size factor requires a lot less onerous demands for deployment.
I assume energy use by electronic devices is a distant runner up of energy use compared to moving lots of mass (individuals + their large personal cars) lots of distance (to and from their large lots in far flung suburbs). And leisure travel of course, especially via airplane.
Oh, I bet you're right. I was only giving the first example that came to mind. I think transportation is a better example, a field where many cities (at least in the USA) could have better quality of life for less energy. When everyone drives their own car every day because public transportation is inadequate and inconvenient, we waste time every day stuck in slow traffic. With more convenient public transportation, the roads are more clear for cars, the air is cleaner, and people don't have to spend as much money on gasoline and car maintenance.
Me too, I printed it and underlined it, I will try to memorize some of the concepts and the exposition, because this is a cristallization of what I vaguely feel about the abuse of LLM I am currently witnessing
Absolutely with you on the abuse of LLMs. I'm deeply concerned about loss of competence and I am so burned out from having to deal with other people's messy and overly complex code.
I think people who think about this like us need to start building resilience for the very real possibility that in a couple of years we'll be the ones dealing with these awful LLM-generated code bases, fixing bad logic and bugs.
That is very true, although I also have the opposite example: some math books at Uni (e.g. the recommended one for calculus) were so dense with information that I could not make head and tails
I often had to buy a second book where the content was... well digestible
Yes and it was never a point, it was just much much denser but still infinite. And so uniform there was no net direction for collapse before expansion took over.
Since there are conserved quantities like energy and angular momentum it is impossible that everything just collapses. If something collapses, there is usually a large amount of matter which does not collapse to carry away the energy and momentum of the collapsing stuff.
Well... hold your horses, when you make solar panel self replicating and self-healing nano-machines that span all over the planet you would have beaten nature.
So far we have beaten nature on the aspect of sheer efficiency
The sibling comment about lift is one of the few things I can think of. Birds would have a tough time. The freezing point of water would also be lowered significantly.
Eliminating a gas while keeping all other partial pressures constant only affects physical processes. Biochemistry on the other hand only relies on partial pressures, and the number of organisms which interact with atmospheric nitrogen are literally so few that you could count them on one hand.
This is all pretty far afield though. There's no way biological processes are even going to have a dent in the ocean of N2 surrounding us.
It's not really clear to me what's your position. In the sense you state that you find it appalling, but what? The fact that there is a problem with such generative AI, the discussion that might follow, or its consequences.
Obviously the powers that be will try to use this at their advantage, trying to tighten a bit control over population, such as rendering AI models illegal, except a selected blessed few (read megacorp. ones)
IMO the general response shouldn't be just trying to defend the freedom position for freedom sake, but to find viable alternative solutions that don't mine the freedom of the population.
For example... we could try to use AI to detect if the images are AI generated or not :) And police should have the means to use AI, maybe given for free by the megacorp that benefit the most from AI
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