this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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345
AI Computing on Pace to Consume More Energy Than India, Arm Says (news.bloomberglaw.com)
submitted 6 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
60 comments fedilink hide all child comments
 

AI’s voracious need for computing power is threatening to overwhelm energy sources, requiring the industry to change its approach to the technology, according to Arm Holdings Plc Chief Executive Officer Rene Haas.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 6 months ago (2 children)

I can't think of a single thing AI does that is worth the amount of energy consumption.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The only really useful AI thing is the denoiser in Adobe Lightroom. I can shoot pictures in pitch black darkness with the highest ISO settings. Obviously it is a grainy mess. The denoiser manages to clean that up while retaining all of the details. It's really fucking great!

Anything else is just novelty bullshit.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Sounds useful, but not at all worth the amount of energy being used to produce AI. You could just use that energy to feed/house people who could do the labor of denoising.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 6 months ago (1 children)

I know what you mean, but it's not really possible to manually denoise a picture the way the AI denoiser does. Let alone within 10 seconds. Plus, it's more of a niche usage. I don't think it consumes all that much energy.

Generating shitty images, creating deepfakes, prompting all kinds of bullshit... now that is a waste of energy as it really just makes the world worse. AI generated articles are popping up all over the internet. They aren't even reviewed anymore. Enshittification of the internet took some gigantic strides since the AI boom.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Do you know if the model is running locally or some cloud shit? If locally, the actual energy usage may be modest.

Energy spent training the model initially may have been prohibitive, though.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

Good question, I'll look it up!

[–] [email protected] -1 points 6 months ago (4 children)

I can’t think of a single thing AI does

[–] [email protected] 6 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago) (1 children)

Come on that's not fair, it's very good* at drawing album covers and video game assets, which gives more time to artists to go work for Starbucks or Amazon instead of doing something they actually enjoy.

* passable actually, but much cheaper.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago

I'm not in the industry per se, but I wouldn't hire an AI to do art for my games or album covers.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago (1 children)

You and AI, both.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

I'm glad to know AI can't think of a single thing AI does, although if it thought otherwise I still wouldn't care.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (1 children)

Correction, AI in the LLM/Diffusion sense is a decent tutor for cheap. Can cobble together rough temp art, and if used by an actually capable artist, make cool stuff.

Anything else and it's a garbage firehose, it's the undisputed king of mediocrity. Which, given the standards of SPAM and the modern web, is exactly what it's being used for.

What a shame.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 months ago (2 children)

Anything you learn from AI has a margin of error that could ruin you.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago (1 children)

And we're rapidly liquidating the reserves of useful information in order to feed this beast.

Google results are declining as websites like Stack Exchange and Reddit crap out, Wikipedia pages are filling up with misinformation, news articles are increasingly full of nonsense and procedural generated fluff.

Its not just garbage on its face. Its a cancer that's spreading through the rest of our internet archives, blotting out the good and bloating front pages with bad data.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 6 months ago

It also gets worse every generation as it recursively feeds on the bad data.

[–] [email protected] -3 points 6 months ago

Still saves a ton of time from learning from either somewhat related tutorials. Garbage courses. Or digging through the modern spam infested web.

It's a decent tutor, never said that it's perfect. I will not hesitate that using it as an assistant has bumped up my productivity and learning by roughly 50% when it comes to programming.

Of course, it has it's myriad problems, specially in bleeding edge fields like AI development with libraries iterating sometimes nightly. As well as it's trend to not exactly teach, but instead answer your specific question. So you still need to have some initiative and still rely on a few human resources.

HOWEVER, I do agree that blindly copy pasting code from an AI is a TERRIBLE idea. And all the buzz about AI developers seems like a disaster waiting to happen (and it certainly will!).