AI, as in machine learning, has always had uses. Like, real useful additions to human capability. It’s very useful in pattern recognition and statistical analysis of various things.

Our more modern shit connotation comes from capitalists trying replace labor with generative AI, which is a small subset of potential machine learning uses, but by its nature sends massive amounts of shlock at us.

Having dealt with ML engineers in depth before, American tech companies tend to throw blank checks their way which, combined with them not tending to have backgrounds in optimization or infrastructure, means they spin up 8 billion GPU instances in the cloud and use 10% of them ever because engineers are lazy.

They could, without any exaggeration, reduce their energy consumption by a factor of ten with about two weeks of honest engineering work. Yes this bothers the fuck out of me.

Who wants to bet their AI will be used for more useful things too?

Unlike in the West where if Nvidia tanks then the entire US economy goes down with it.

Is it actually “sustainable” though? I’d like to see some wattage numbers.

I said this in the other thread but I’ll say it again: our sophisticated artificial intelligence, their planet burning chatbot.

Idk about sustainability. It still requires massive computing infrastructure, which for now requires unsustainable ways of sourcing metals

So AI could be more sustainable this whole time? Interesting…

Yeah a lot of the breakthrough research has happened via cheaper / resource limited methods now that the cat is out of the bag. We live in interesting times.