Theoretically we could slow down training and coast on fine-tuning existing models. Once the AI’s trained they don’t take that much energy to run.
Everyone was racing towards “bigger is better” because it worked up to GPT4, but word on the street is that raw training is giving diminishing returns so the massive spending on compute is just a waste now.
Issue is, we’re reaching the limits of what GPT technologies can do, so we have to retrain them for the new ones, and currently available data have been already poisoned by AI generated garbage, which will make the adaptation of new technologies harder.
Surely this is better than the crypto/NFT tech fad. At least there is some output from the generative AI that could be beneficial to the whole of humankind rather than lining a few people’s pockets?
But it’s really strange how anti-crypto ideologues don’t understand that the system of states printing money is literally destroying the planet. They can’t see the value of a free, fair, decentralized, automatable, accounting systems?
Somehow delusional chatbots wasting energy and resources are more worthwhile?
You are right, crypto has nothing to do with currency printing. And yes, the environmental side too is a problem (unless it is produced inline with recycled energy) But governments issuing currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, people traded de facto currencies and IOUs amongst themselves.
Bitcoin was conceived out of the 2008 financial crisis, as a direct response to big banks being bailed out. It’s literally written in Bitcoin’s Genesis block. The point of Bitcoin has always been to free people from the tyranny of big government AND big capital.
Crypto isn’t that popular in developed countries with functioning monetary systems… untill of course those big institutions fail. I am still quite surprised, this side of Bitcoin is rarely discussed on Lemmy, given how anticapitalist it is.
I get it libertarian, bad. And to some degree, there are a lot of problems there. But the extreme opposite ain’t that rosy either.
Are you really using all of human history as a timeframe to say that currency is a relatively recent phenomenon?
Again, I’m not anti-cryptocurrency, but it’s not really a currency anymore than any other commodity in a commodity exchange, or a barter market.
And I don’t care if it’s livestock, or Bitcoin, I’m not accepting either as payment if I sell my home, or car. Not because of principles, but because I don’t know how to convert livestock into cash, and I can’t risk the Bitcoin payment halving in value before I can convert it to cash.
And who was talking extremes? I’m just pointing out the absurdity of the claims that crypto is the replacement for, or salvation from, our current economic system, or the delusion that currency backed by a nation is somehow just as ephemeral as Bitcoin, or ERC20 rug pulls.
You said Bitcoin was designed to free us from the tyranny of big capital, but it’s been entirely co-opted by the same boogeyman. So regardless of the intentionality behind the project, it’s now just another speculative asset.
Except, unlike gold or futures contracts, there’s no tangible real world asset, but there is a hell of a real cost.
I think it’s because of what crypto turned into and the inherent flaws in the system. Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on traditional currency, and their value is too unstable for the average person. The largest proponents of crypto have been corporations - big capital, as you put it - and there’s a reason for that (though they’re more on the speculative market of NFTs looking to make a profit off of Ponzi schemes).
In the end, crypto hasn’t solved any problems that weren’t already solved by less energy intensive means.
I’m fine doing away with physical dollars printed on paper and coins but crypto seems to solve none of the problems that we have with a fiat currency but instead continues to consume unnecessary amounts of energy while being driven by rich investors that would love nothing more than to spend and earn money in an untraceable way.
Unfortunately crypto is still somehow a thing. There is a couple year old bitcoin mining facility in my small town that brags about consuming 400MW of power to operate and they are solely owned by a Chinese company.
It takes living with a broken system to understand the fix for it. There are millions of people who have been saved by Bitcoin and the freedom that it brings, they are just mainly in the 2nd and 3rd worlds, so to many people they basically don’t exist.
That’s great and all but doesn’t sound like a valid excuse for the excessive amount of energy it consumes. It’s also hard for me to imagine 3rd world places that somehow flourish because of a currency that needs the Internet to exist.
I just looked it up, it looks like it is the a difference of 35% to 80% in the developed world.
Imagine this, you are forced to hold your wealth in corrupt government run banks. They often print tons of it for themselves, criminals are printing it, the government can seize it from anyone they want. You can try to store it at home, yourself, or you can give it to the banks. Now there is a third option, store it as Bitcoin. No need for risking it under your bed or with the corrupt banker politicians, and on top of those be victims to their inflation. Sure, your bank probably doesn’t often seize your money, and your currency probably isn’t rapidly devaluing even compared to the dollar, but if it was then you would probably think the energy is worth it.
But crypto also suffers from crashes and being devalued and if you’re buying Bitcoin with your hard earned dollar that is worth less and less then you are ultimately buying less and less Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin still needs all of the other currency to function as a middle man makes it vulnerable to the same risks. Maybe it helps people in niche situations but I’m sure we’ll all be thinking it’s worth it when those same struggling places are the hardest hit by climate change. At least they’ll have a bunch of digital currency propped up by fiat currency.
It would be fantastic if people being abused by corrupt politicians and currencies was niche! It’s not though, there are hundreds of millions of people struggling with it. Billions depending on how you count it. It is a disease of the 1st world to be unable to accept that not everyone has the same privileges they enjoy. Human beings are literally starving to death and dying decades early due to poverty, Bitcoin is literally keeping them alive. Spoiled brats want them to die because they saw a headline that tells them to parrot that Bitcoin is bad. Where is your outrage over Christmas lights? How about video games? These things don’t save lives and transform existences like safe money does.
Nearly everyone who has bought Bitcoin and held are up, it has outperformed every stock, every currency, every investment on large enough time scales. Give me a volatile currency that goes up in value over volatile currencies that utterly collapse. Where is the outrage over the lira? Or any other currency that is down to 5% of itself that people are “supposed” to hold according to you?
There is a very good reason that you don’t have answers to these. It is because all you know on the issue is that you are not supposed to look to deeply and you’re supposed to mindlessly repeat that Bitcoin is bad without having any idea why. You are allowed to research, you are allowed to make your own decisions, you are allowed to talk to people in the 2nd and 3ed worlds. You are allowed to travel to these places and talk to people. Nobody forces you to repeat their BS, you just have to decide that you want to learn and then put in some effort.
Ive worked in 3rd world and I’m shocked that you think these people give a shit about Bitcoin or that it can do anything for them. You can sing its praises all you want and go on and on about how it’s just me repeating what I’ve been told. It’s a joke.
But paper currency is backed by a nation state, so I’m betting it’ll be around a bit longer then a purely digital speculative asset without the backing of a nation, and driven entirely by speculation.
I’m not even anti-crypto. It was novel idea when it was actually used entirely as a currency, but that hasn’t been true for quite some time.
Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on those same currencies. And their value is incredibly unstable, making them largely useless except as a speculative investment for stock market daytraders. BitCoin may as well be Doge Coin or Bored Ape NFTs as far as the common person is concerned.
I hope your coins haven’t seen a 90%+ drop in value in the past 4 years like the vast majority have.
What do you mean by “backed” here? I think I’m misunderstanding but I thought (and a short google seems to confirm) that currency A being backed by currency B means the value of A is fixed at a certain amount of currency B, and there is some organisation “backing” this with reserves.
Not trying to shill/defend crypto, just confused on terminology :)
I mean that crypto currencies are essentially the same as stocks. They have no worth on their own, and their value is tied to converting them to other currencies.
And this conversion rate fluctuates constantly. What one bitcoin is worth today is not what it will be worth tomorrow. In order to buy something with a crypto currency, companies have to first check how much it’s worth in fiat currency.
While the consumption for AI train can be large, there are arguments to be made for its net effect in the long run.
The article’s last section gives a few examples that are interesting to me from an environmental perspective. Using smaller problem-specific models can have a large effect in reducing AI emissions, since their relation to model size is not linear. AI assistance can indeed increase worker productivity, which does not necessarily decrease emissions but we have to keep in mind that our bodies are pretty inefficient meat bags. Last but not least, AI literacy can lead to better legislation and regulation.
The argument that our bodies are inefficient meat bags doesn’t make sense. AI isn’t replacing the inefficient meat bag unless I’m unaware of an AI killing people off and so far I’ve yet to see AI make any meaningful dent in overall emissions or research. A chatgpt query can use 10x more power than a regular Google search and there is no chance the result is 10x more useful. AI feels more like it’s adding to the enshittification of the internet and because of its energy use the enshittification of our planet. IMO if these companies can’t afford to build renewables to support their use then they can fuck off.
Useful in the way that it increases emissions and hopefully leads to our demise because that’s what we deserve for this stupid technology.
Theoretically we could slow down training and coast on fine-tuning existing models. Once the AI’s trained they don’t take that much energy to run.
Everyone was racing towards “bigger is better” because it worked up to GPT4, but word on the street is that raw training is giving diminishing returns so the massive spending on compute is just a waste now.
Issue is, we’re reaching the limits of what GPT technologies can do, so we have to retrain them for the new ones, and currently available data have been already poisoned by AI generated garbage, which will make the adaptation of new technologies harder.
Surely this is better than the crypto/NFT tech fad. At least there is some output from the generative AI that could be beneficial to the whole of humankind rather than lining a few people’s pockets?
I’m crypto neutral.
But it’s really strange how anti-crypto ideologues don’t understand that the system of states printing money is literally destroying the planet. They can’t see the value of a free, fair, decentralized, automatable, accounting systems?
Somehow delusional chatbots wasting energy and resources are more worthwhile?
Printing currency isn’t destroying the planet…the current economic system is doing that, which is the same economic system that birthed crypto.
Governments issuing currency goes back to a time long before our current consumption at all cost economic system was a thing.
You are right, crypto has nothing to do with currency printing. And yes, the environmental side too is a problem (unless it is produced inline with recycled energy) But governments issuing currency is a relatively recent phenomenon. Historically, people traded de facto currencies and IOUs amongst themselves.
Bitcoin was conceived out of the 2008 financial crisis, as a direct response to big banks being bailed out. It’s literally written in Bitcoin’s Genesis block. The point of Bitcoin has always been to free people from the tyranny of big government AND big capital.
Crypto isn’t that popular in developed countries with functioning monetary systems… untill of course those big institutions fail. I am still quite surprised, this side of Bitcoin is rarely discussed on Lemmy, given how anticapitalist it is.
I get it libertarian, bad. And to some degree, there are a lot of problems there. But the extreme opposite ain’t that rosy either.
Are you really using all of human history as a timeframe to say that currency is a relatively recent phenomenon?
Again, I’m not anti-cryptocurrency, but it’s not really a currency anymore than any other commodity in a commodity exchange, or a barter market.
And I don’t care if it’s livestock, or Bitcoin, I’m not accepting either as payment if I sell my home, or car. Not because of principles, but because I don’t know how to convert livestock into cash, and I can’t risk the Bitcoin payment halving in value before I can convert it to cash.
And who was talking extremes? I’m just pointing out the absurdity of the claims that crypto is the replacement for, or salvation from, our current economic system, or the delusion that currency backed by a nation is somehow just as ephemeral as Bitcoin, or ERC20 rug pulls.
You said Bitcoin was designed to free us from the tyranny of big capital, but it’s been entirely co-opted by the same boogeyman. So regardless of the intentionality behind the project, it’s now just another speculative asset.
Except, unlike gold or futures contracts, there’s no tangible real world asset, but there is a hell of a real cost.
I think it’s because of what crypto turned into and the inherent flaws in the system. Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on traditional currency, and their value is too unstable for the average person. The largest proponents of crypto have been corporations - big capital, as you put it - and there’s a reason for that (though they’re more on the speculative market of NFTs looking to make a profit off of Ponzi schemes).
In the end, crypto hasn’t solved any problems that weren’t already solved by less energy intensive means.
I’m fine doing away with physical dollars printed on paper and coins but crypto seems to solve none of the problems that we have with a fiat currency but instead continues to consume unnecessary amounts of energy while being driven by rich investors that would love nothing more than to spend and earn money in an untraceable way.
Unfortunately crypto is still somehow a thing. There is a couple year old bitcoin mining facility in my small town that brags about consuming 400MW of power to operate and they are solely owned by a Chinese company.
It takes living with a broken system to understand the fix for it. There are millions of people who have been saved by Bitcoin and the freedom that it brings, they are just mainly in the 2nd and 3rd worlds, so to many people they basically don’t exist.
That’s great and all but doesn’t sound like a valid excuse for the excessive amount of energy it consumes. It’s also hard for me to imagine 3rd world places that somehow flourish because of a currency that needs the Internet to exist.
I just looked it up, it looks like it is the a difference of 35% to 80% in the developed world.
Imagine this, you are forced to hold your wealth in corrupt government run banks. They often print tons of it for themselves, criminals are printing it, the government can seize it from anyone they want. You can try to store it at home, yourself, or you can give it to the banks. Now there is a third option, store it as Bitcoin. No need for risking it under your bed or with the corrupt banker politicians, and on top of those be victims to their inflation. Sure, your bank probably doesn’t often seize your money, and your currency probably isn’t rapidly devaluing even compared to the dollar, but if it was then you would probably think the energy is worth it.
But crypto also suffers from crashes and being devalued and if you’re buying Bitcoin with your hard earned dollar that is worth less and less then you are ultimately buying less and less Bitcoin. The fact that Bitcoin still needs all of the other currency to function as a middle man makes it vulnerable to the same risks. Maybe it helps people in niche situations but I’m sure we’ll all be thinking it’s worth it when those same struggling places are the hardest hit by climate change. At least they’ll have a bunch of digital currency propped up by fiat currency.
Climate change is a separate issue.
It would be fantastic if people being abused by corrupt politicians and currencies was niche! It’s not though, there are hundreds of millions of people struggling with it. Billions depending on how you count it. It is a disease of the 1st world to be unable to accept that not everyone has the same privileges they enjoy. Human beings are literally starving to death and dying decades early due to poverty, Bitcoin is literally keeping them alive. Spoiled brats want them to die because they saw a headline that tells them to parrot that Bitcoin is bad. Where is your outrage over Christmas lights? How about video games? These things don’t save lives and transform existences like safe money does.
Nearly everyone who has bought Bitcoin and held are up, it has outperformed every stock, every currency, every investment on large enough time scales. Give me a volatile currency that goes up in value over volatile currencies that utterly collapse. Where is the outrage over the lira? Or any other currency that is down to 5% of itself that people are “supposed” to hold according to you?
There is a very good reason that you don’t have answers to these. It is because all you know on the issue is that you are not supposed to look to deeply and you’re supposed to mindlessly repeat that Bitcoin is bad without having any idea why. You are allowed to research, you are allowed to make your own decisions, you are allowed to talk to people in the 2nd and 3ed worlds. You are allowed to travel to these places and talk to people. Nobody forces you to repeat their BS, you just have to decide that you want to learn and then put in some effort.
Ive worked in 3rd world and I’m shocked that you think these people give a shit about Bitcoin or that it can do anything for them. You can sing its praises all you want and go on and on about how it’s just me repeating what I’ve been told. It’s a joke.
I recently noticed a number of bitcoin ATMs that have cropped up where I live - mostly at gas stations and the like. I am a little concerned by it.
Do you really think that paper money covered in colonizers and other slavermasters is going to last forever?
Bullets and toilet paper will be more usable currency than crypto if paper falls out of favor.
lol
Forever? No, of course not.
But paper currency is backed by a nation state, so I’m betting it’ll be around a bit longer then a purely digital speculative asset without the backing of a nation, and driven entirely by speculation.
I’m not even anti-crypto. It was novel idea when it was actually used entirely as a currency, but that hasn’t been true for quite some time.
Found the diamond hands.
Crypto currencies are still backed by and dependent on those same currencies. And their value is incredibly unstable, making them largely useless except as a speculative investment for stock market daytraders. BitCoin may as well be Doge Coin or Bored Ape NFTs as far as the common person is concerned.
I hope your coins haven’t seen a 90%+ drop in value in the past 4 years like the vast majority have.
What do you mean by “backed” here? I think I’m misunderstanding but I thought (and a short google seems to confirm) that currency A being backed by currency B means the value of A is fixed at a certain amount of currency B, and there is some organisation “backing” this with reserves.
Not trying to shill/defend crypto, just confused on terminology :)
I mean that crypto currencies are essentially the same as stocks. They have no worth on their own, and their value is tied to converting them to other currencies.
And this conversion rate fluctuates constantly. What one bitcoin is worth today is not what it will be worth tomorrow. In order to buy something with a crypto currency, companies have to first check how much it’s worth in fiat currency.
That’s why you stick with Bitcoin instead of running after whatever flashy new super duper coin that assholes trick fools into buying.
I hope this is sarcasm.
While the consumption for AI train can be large, there are arguments to be made for its net effect in the long run.
The article’s last section gives a few examples that are interesting to me from an environmental perspective. Using smaller problem-specific models can have a large effect in reducing AI emissions, since their relation to model size is not linear. AI assistance can indeed increase worker productivity, which does not necessarily decrease emissions but we have to keep in mind that our bodies are pretty inefficient meat bags. Last but not least, AI literacy can lead to better legislation and regulation.
Sure, if you consider anything at all to be “AI”. I’m pretty sure my spellchecker is relatively efficient.
What do I need to read about my spellchecker? What legislation and regulation does it need?
The argument that our bodies are inefficient meat bags doesn’t make sense. AI isn’t replacing the inefficient meat bag unless I’m unaware of an AI killing people off and so far I’ve yet to see AI make any meaningful dent in overall emissions or research. A chatgpt query can use 10x more power than a regular Google search and there is no chance the result is 10x more useful. AI feels more like it’s adding to the enshittification of the internet and because of its energy use the enshittification of our planet. IMO if these companies can’t afford to build renewables to support their use then they can fuck off.