Everyone’s memeing but it looks grim.
Having AI turn into an arms race between China and the U.S. will only accelerate its growth. For a while it looked like AI was stagnating, the bubble might burst, and people were tempering their expectations of what we had. That just got thrown out the window. I can’t think of any way you could damage the competitiveness of what China is offering, so U.S. tech now have to improve and there will probably be greater support from the U.S. government to see that improvement.
People simply don’t win in the long term when these improvements will go towards taking their jobs.
The US is always in competition with someone else to try and prove how great they are. It’s hard for everyone else to get upset about it at this point, whether the competition is internal or external it really doesn’t matter. It’s just capitalism. It was always going to get pushed to the very limit of what it’s capable of, and it was always going to threaten people’s jobs. This doesn’t change anything.
If anything this is a positive move because at least when the AI replaces us normal people, we will actually be able to make use of it rather than it just being the sole domain of the mega corporations.
Assuming that poster is from the US, it is amazing that he calls another country a “cop state”.
He’s a well-known smug idiot tech bro, and invests in open AI so you can pretty much ignore everything he says.
He says they’re faking the low cost, but it’s open source. You can download and run it yourself.
THEY’RE DAMAGING AI COMPETITIVENESS BY COMPETING AGAINST OUR AI WITH THEIR AI!!!
free market capitalist when a new competitor enters the market who happens to be foreign: noooooo this is economic warfare!!!
My mom is Sally and ready to brown it
We literally are at the stage where when someone says: “this is a psyop” then that is the psyop. When someone says: “these drag queens are groomers” they are the groomers. When someone says: “the establishment wants to keep you stupid and poor” they are the establishment who want to keep you stupid and poor.
We have been at this stage at least since the cold war my friend. Every accusation is an admission. They cannot allow the people at large to imagine a world without the evils incentivised by capitalism.
AI is either a solution in search of a problem,
or it’s the next scheme designed to gobble up as much VC money as possible and boost NVIDIA stock value, now that the Cryptocurrency bubble has passed.
I wasn’t under the impression American AI was profitable either. I thought it was held up by VC funding and over valued stock. I may be wrong though. Haven’t done a deep dive on it.
Okay, I literally didn’t even post the comment yet and did the most shallow of dives. Open AI is not profitable. https://www.cnbc.com/2024/09/27/openai-sees-5-billion-loss-this-year-on-3point7-billion-in-revenue.html
The CEO said on twitter that even their $200/month pro plan was losing money on every customer: https://techcrunch.com/2025/01/05/openai-is-losing-money-on-its-pricey-chatgpt-pro-plan-ceo-sam-altman-says/
I don’t see how they would become profitable any time soon if their costs are that high. Maybe if they adapt the innovations of deepseek to their own model.
Haven’t done a deep dive on it.
deep seek you mean?
👉😎👉
So this guy is just going to pretend that all of these AI startups in thee US offering tokens at a fraction of what they should be in order to break-even (let alone make a profit) are not doing the exact same thing?
Every prompt everyone makes is subsidized by investors’ money. These companies do not make sense, they are speculative and everyone is hoping to get their own respective unicorn and cash out before the bill comes due.
My company grabbed 7200 tokens (min of footage) on Opus for like $400. Even if 90% of what it turns out for us is useless it’s still a steal. There is no way they are making money on this. It’s not sustainable. Either they need to lower the cost to generate their slop (which deep think could help guide!) or they need to charge 10x what they do. They’re doing the user acquisition strategy of social media and it’s absurd.
So this guy is just going to pretend that all of these AI startups in thee US offering tokens at a fraction of what they should be in order to break-even (let alone make a profit) are not doing the exact same thing?
fake it til you make it is a patriotic duty!
Why is everyone making this about a U.S. vs. China thing and not an LLMs suck and we should not be in favor of them anywhere thing?
We just don’t follow the dogma “AI bad”.
I use LLM regularly as a coding aid. And it works fine. Yesterday I had to put a math formula on code. My math knowledge is somehow rusty. So I just pasted the formula on the LLM, asked for an explanation and an example on how to put it in code. It worked perfectly, it was just right. I understood the formula and could proceed with the code.
The whole process took seconds. If I had to go down the rabbit hole of searching until I figured out the math formula by myself it could have maybe a couple of hours.
It’s just a tool. Properly used it’s useful.
And don’t try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions. If regular people want to reduce their carbon footprint the first step is giving up vacations on far away places. I have run LLMs locally and the energy consumption is similar to gaming, so there’s not a case to be made there, imho.
Changing your diet is more impactful than stopping international travel.
I’m going to fact check you, and you are not going to like it. But I hope you are able to learn instead of keeping yourself in a dogma.
Let’s assume only one international flight per year. 12 hours. Times 2 as you have to come back . So 24 hours in a plane.
A plane emits 250 Kg of CO2 by passenger by hour. Total product is 250x24. Which equals 6 tons of CO2 emited by one international travel.
Now we go with diet. I only eat chicken and pork (beef is expensive). My country average is 100Kg of meat per person per year. Pork production takes 12 Kg of CO2 per Kg of meat. Chicken is 10, so I will average at 11 Kg. 11Kg of CO2 multiplies by 100Kg eaten makes 1.1 tons of CO2.
6 is greater than 1.1. about 6 times greater give it or take.
So my decision of not doing international travel saves 6 tons of CO2 to the atmosphere per travel. While if I would completely take the meat I eat from my diet I would only reduce 1.1 ton of CO2 per year.
Sources: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_meat_consumption https://www.dw.com/en/fact-check-is-eating-meat-bad-for-the-environment/a-63595148 https://www.carbonindependent.org/22.html
I still think the numbers will be skewed heavily by those that travel internationally 0 times per year, but I think your math is accurate from what I can tell. Essentially, less air travel is good if you regularly travel, otherwise not so much.
How’s the math turn out if people use alternate means of travel? Is traveling by boat still a thing?
“ai bad” is obviously stupid.
Current LLM bad is very true. The method used to create is immoral, and are arguably illegal. In fact, some of the ai companies push to make what they did clearly illegal. How convenient…
And I hope you understand that using the LLM locally consuming the same amount as gaming is completely missing the point, right? The training and the required on-going training is what makes it so wasteful. That is like saying eating bananas in the winter in Sweden is not generating that much CO2 because the distance to the supermarket is not that far.
I don’t believe in Intelectual Property. I’m actually very against it.
But if you believe in it for some reason there are models exclusively trained with open data. Spanish government recently released a model called ALIA, it was 100% done with open data, none of the data used for it was proprietary.
Training energy consumption is not a problem because it’s made so sparsely. It’s like complaining about animation movies because rendering takes months using a lot of power. It’s an irrational argument. I don’t buy it.
I am not necessarily got intellectual property but as long as they want to have IPs on their shit, they should respect everyone else’s. That is what is immoral.
How is it made sparsely? The training time for e.g. chatgtp 4 was 4 months. Chatgtp 3.5 was released in November 2023, chatgtp 4 was released in March 2024. How many months are between that? Oh look at that… They train their ai 24/7. For chatgtp 4 training, they consumed 7200MWh. The average American household consumes a little less than 11000kWh per year. They consumed in 1/3 of the time, 654 times the energy of the average American household. So in a year, they consume around 2000 times the electricity of an average American household. That is just training. And that is just electricity. We don’t even talk about the water. We are also ignoring that they are scaling up. So if they would which they didn’t, use the same resources to train their next models.
Edit: sidenote, in 2024, chatgtp was projected to use 226.8 GWh.
2000 times, given your approximations as correct, the usage of a household for something that’s used by millions, or potentially billions, of people it’s not bad at all.
Probably comparable with 3d movies or many other industrial computer uses, like search indexers.
Yeah, but then they start “gaming”…
I just edited my comment, just no wonder you missed it.
In 2024, chatgtp was projected to use 226.8 GWh. You see, if people are “gaming” 24/7, it is quite wasteful.
Edit: just in case, it isn’t obvious. The hardware needs to be produced. The data collected. And they are scaling up. So my point was that even if you do locally sometimes a little bit of LLM, there is more energy consumed then just the energy used for that 1 prompt.
Yeah it’s ridiculous. GPT-4 serves billions of tokens every day so if you take that into account the cost per token is very very low.
IRL the first step to cutting emissions is what you’re eating. Meat and animal products come with huge environmental costs and reducing how much animal products you consume can cut your footprint substantially.
There’s some argument to be made there.
It depend where you live. If you live where I live a fully plant diet is mor environmentally damaging that omnivore diet. Because I would need to consume lots of plants that come from tropical environments to have a full diet, which means one of two things, import from far away or intensive irrigation in a dry environment.
While here farm animals can and are feed with local plants that do no need intensive irrigation.
Someday I shall make full calculations on this. But I’m not sure which option would give best carbon footprint. But I’m not that sure about full plant diet here.
The catch is there’s nowhere on earth where a plant diet has a higher carbon footprint unless you go out of your way to pursue foods from foreign sources that are resource intensive.
Realistically it will always take more to grow a chicken or a fish than grow a plant.
Try living on lucerne. Then, come again.
Realistic, as in real life, my grandparents had chickens “for free”, as the residues from other plants that cannot be eaten by humans were the food of the chickens. So realistically trying to substitute the nutrients of those free chickens with plant based solutions would be a lot more expensive in all ways.
Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.
You didn’t even read my statement.
If your answer is going to be again some variation of the dogma: “Still true no matter where you live because the carbon costs of raising animals is higher than plants.” without considering that some plants used to feed animals are incredibly cheap to produce(and that humans cannot live on those planta), and that some animals live on human waste without even needing to plant food for them. Then don’t even bother to reply.
Hmm, even developing countries with local livestock and organic feed for them it’s still a lot better for the environment to be vegetarian or vegan, by far. It’s always more efficient to be more plant-based, rather than growing plants for animals to eat and then eating those animals.
I really need to do the calculations here.
Because growing plants for animals do not have, by far, the same cost that growing plants for humans.
My grandparents grew lucerne for livestock. And it really doesn’t take much to grow. While crops for humans tend to take mucho more water and energy.
And for some animals, like chickens, you can just use residues from other crops.
I don’t think it’s that straightforward.
My grandparents used to live in an old village, with their farm, and that wasn’t a very contaminating lifestyle. But if they would want to became began they would have needed to import goods from across the globe to have a healthy diet.
And don’t try to bit me with the AI bad for environment. Because I stopped traveling abroad by plane more than a decade ago to reduce my carbon emissions.
It’s absurd that you even need to make this argument. The “carbon footprint” fallacy was created by big oil so we’ll blame each other instead of pursuing pigouvian pollution taxes that would actually work.
I don’t really think so.
Humans pollute. Evading individual responsibility in what we do it’s irresponsible.
If you decide you want to “find yourself” travelling from US to India by plane. Not amount of taxes is going to fix the amount of CO2 emited by that plane.
(Sorry to be so verbose…)
For what it’s worth, I worked on geared turbofans in the jet engine industry. They’re more fuel efficient… but also more complicated, so most airlines opt for the simpler (more reliable) designs that use more fuel. This is similar to the problem with leaded fuel, which is still used in a handful of aircraft.
Airplanes could be much greener, there were once economies of scale to ship travel, and relying on altruism at scale just doesn’t work at all anyways. Pigouvian taxes have a track record of success. So especially in the short term, the selfish person who decides to “find himself” would look at a high price of flying (which now includes external costs) and decide to not fly at all.
Relying on altruism (and possibly social pressure) isn’t working, and that was always what big oil intended. Even homeless people are polluting above sustainable levels. We’re giving each other purity tests instead of using very settled economics.
“AI bad”
One thing that’s frustrating to me is that everything is getting called AI now, even things that we used to call different things. And I’m not making some “um actually it isn’t real AI” argument. When people just believe “AI bad” then it’s just so much stuff.
Here’s an example. Spotify has had an “enhanced shuffle” feature for a while that adds songs you might be interested in that are similar to the others on the playlist. Somebody said they don’t use it because it’s AI. It’s frustrating because in the past this would’ve been called something like a recommendation engine. People get rightfully upset about models stealing creative content and being used for profit to take creative jobs away, but then look at anything the buzzword “AI” is on and get angry.
What are you doing to reduce your fresh water usage? You do know how much fresh water they waste, right?
Do you? Also do you what are the actual issues on fresh water? Do you actually think cooling of some data center it’s actually relevant? Because I really, data on hand, think it’s not. It’s just part of the dogma.
Stop trying to eat vegetables that need watering out of areas without a lot of rain, much better approach if you care about that. Eat what people on your area ate a few centuries ago if you want to be water sustainable.
Are you serious? Do you not know how they cool data centers?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/artificial-intelligence-climate-energy-emissions
That’s nothing compared with intensive irrigation.
Having a diet proper to your region has a massively bigger impact on water than some cooling.
Also not every place on earth have fresh water issues. Some places have it some are pretty ok. Not using water in a place where it’s plenty does nothing for people in a place where there is scarcity of fresh water.
I shall know as my country is pretty dry. Supercomputers, as the one used for our national AI, had had not visible impact on water supply.
You read all three of those links in four minutes?
Also, irrigation creates food, which people need to survive, while AI creates nothing that people need to survive, so that’s a terrible comparison.
I’m already familiarized on industrial and computer usage of water. As I said, very little impact.
Not all food is needed to survive. Any vegan would probably give a better argument on this than me. But choice of food it’s important. And choosing one food over another it’s not a matter of survival but a matter of joy, a tertiary necessity.
Not to sound as a boomer, but if this is such a big worry for you better action may be stop eating avocados in a place where avocados don’t naturally grow.
As I said, I live in a pretty dry place, where water cuts because of scarcity are common. Our very few super computers have not an impact on it. And supercomputers on china certainly are 100% irrelevant to our water scarcity issue.
Because they need to protect their investment bubble. If that bursts before Deepseek is banned, a few people are going to lose a lot of money, and they sure as heck aren’t gonna pay for it themselves.
I’m talking about everyone here in this discussion thread.
I mean I’m not saying the investment isn’t emotional only.
Fucking exactly. Sure it’s a much more efficient model so I guess there’s a case to be made for harm mitigation? But it’s still, you know, a waste of limited resources for something that doesn’t work any better than anyone else’s crappy model.
Also what’s more American than taking a loss to under cut competition and then hiking when everyone else goes out of business
It is capitalism when American parasite does this, mate.
Now apologize!
It’s capitalism when China does it, too. Regardless of China actually doing it with this ai thing or not.
China outwardly is a deeply capitalist country.
The major difference is China just replaced religion and freedumb™️ as the opiate of the masses with communism™️
Also, don’t forget that all the other AI services are also setting artificially low prices to bait customers and enshittify later.
I don’t understand why everyone’s freaking out about this.
Saying you can train an AI for “only” 8 million. It is a bit like saying that it’s cheaper to have a bunch of university professors do something than to teach a student how to do it. Yeah and that is true, as long as you forget about the expense of training the professors in the first place.
It’s a distilled model, so where are you getting the original data from if not for the other LLMs?
If you can make a fast, low power, cheap hardware AI, you can make terrifying tiny drone weapons that autonomously and networklessly seek out specific people by facial recognition or generally target groups of people based on appearance or presence of a token, like a flag on a shoulder patch, and kill them.
Unshackling AI from the data centre is incredibly powerful and dangerous.
Dead internet theory (now a reality) has become the dead AI theory.
Tis true. I’m not a real person writing this but rather a dead AI
The other LLMs also stole their data, so it’s just a last laugh kinda thing
US corporate sector throwing a tantrum when it gets beat at it’s own game.
“The free market auto-regulates itself” motherfuckers when the free market auto-regulates itself
The thing about unhinged conspiratards is this, even if their unhinged conspiracy is true and you take everything as a matter of fact, the thing they’re railing against is actually better. Like on this case. Deepseek, from what we can tell, is better. Even if they spent $500Bil and are undercutting the competition that’s capitalism baby! I think ai is a farce and those resources should be put to better use.
The moment deepseek seeks (haha, see what i did there) to freely talk about Tiananmen square, I’ll admit it’s better
you can already do so buy running it localy. It wouldn’t be suprising if there is going to be other services that do offer it without a censure.
Nice. I haven’t peeked at it. Does it have guard rails around Tieneman square?
I’m positive there are guardrails around Trump/Elon fascists.
It’s literally the first thing everybody did. There are no original ideas anymore
I’m all for dunking on china but american AI was unprofitable long before china entered the game.
*was never profitable.
At least with Costco loss-leaders you get a hot dog and a drink.
I am personally of the opinion that IKEA sells furniture as a loss leader, and their real business is Swedish meatballs.
