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Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too | TechCrunch (techcrunch.com)
submitted 6 months ago by to c/nottheonion@lemmy.world
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“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

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[–] 53 points 6 months ago (3 children)

Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

"Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network."

Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that'll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago* (1 child)

    Well another argument they have is the amount of waste that comes with the churn of fiat currency, where we inflate asset values in order to deliberately grow aggregate demand.

    The housing bubble for instance was obviously cheap debt, which was used to grow aggregate consumption, by rewarding asset holders thus encouraging them to offload their asset to increase the velocity of money.

    On the gold standard the average mortgage was 7 years, which was because there was less need to grow the money supply, because we werent trying to force an inflation target. Massive windfalls werent common, and thus housing wasnt being bid up via the cantillon effect, so was better for society in many ways when consumption wasnt being forced onto people.

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  • [–] 1 point 6 months ago

    The problem was that things started breaking at scale under the gold standard. The great depression happened under the gold standard, and financial institutions had no ability to do anything to fix the mass hysteria.

    Yes, the house as an investment vehicle rather than a house is a problem, but it's not because of fiat currency per se. The population density increasing under a capitalistic system pretty much guarantees that housing becomes a speculative asset regardless of the specifics of the currency system.

    Meanwhile BTC has been wildly unpredictable and when it's at its most hyped, massively deflationary which is also a terrible thing.

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  • [+] -23 points 6 months ago (2 children)

    Yeah because nobody drugs with any other method than bitcoin. Clutch those pearls harder while you wash down your leagal and totally not drugs pharmaceutical pills and alcohol.

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  • [–] 2 points 6 months ago

    Mistaking the map for the territory. The argument isn't that bitcoin is bad because it's used to buy drugs, it's bad because the network would choke if it even had to handle the economic activity of a moderately sized town.

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