HN reacts to a New Yorker piece on the “obscene energy demands of AI” with exactly the same arguments coiners use when confronted with the energy cost of blockchain - the product is valuable in of itself, demands for more energy will spur investment in energy generation, and what about the energy costs of painting oil on canvas, hmmmmmm???

Maybe it’s just my newness antennae needing calibrating, but I do feel the extreme energy requirements for what’s arguably just a frivolous toy is gonna cause AI boosters big problems, especially as energy demands ramp up in the US in the warmer months. Expect the narrative to adjust to counter it.

  • skillissuer
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    10 months ago

    There are other kinds of AI use cases, such as alphafold and the materials research Deepmind published

    alphafold is mostly pattern matching on known proteins and the other bit, well google very quickly distanced themselves from these shitty results when they learned how shitty they are. i’ve made a post about it specifically https://discuss.tchncs.de/post/11138402 and i won’t rewrite it again