… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).
On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.
… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).
On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.
Training model and the fact that you have to, in effect, burn down a tree to get it to generate an email for your¹ lazy ass. And a small copse of trees to generate a piece of shit “art”.
¹ General “you”, not you specifically.
The energy usage is mainly on the training side with LLMs. Generating afterwards is fairly cheap. Maybe what you want is to have fewer companies trying to train their own models from scratch and encourage collaborating instead?
It’s a bottle of water per ChatGPT-generated email just for cooling, plus the electricity of 14 typical household LED bulbs running over an hour.
That’s the price for using it. Not training it. Training it is far higher.
Source
Indeed. Though what we should be thinking about is not just the cost in absolute terms, but in relation to the benefit. GPT-4 is one of the more expensive models to run right now, and you can accomplish very good results with their smaller GPT-4o mini at 0.5% of the energy cost[1]. That’s the cost of running 0.07 LED bulbs over an hour, or running 1 LED bulb over 0.07 hours (i.e. 5min). If that saves you 5min of time writing an email while the room is lit with a single LED bulb and your computer is drawing energy, that might just be worth it, right?
[1] Estimated by using https://huggingface.co/spaces/genai-impact/ecologits-calculator and the pricing difference between GPT-4o, 4o mini, and 3.5 (https://openai.com/api/pricing/). The assumption I’m making is that the total hardware and energy cost scales linearly with the API pricing.
This is not a good assumption. NONE of the GPT plans make any amount of profit, so the pricing is not going to be linked to hardware and energy costs, but rather toward addicting people to the product so they can raise the prices into profitability at an impossible future when people can’t live without their shit products.
The benefit is zero, so the cost:benefit ratio is ∞.
Yeah, they operate very opaquely, so we can’t know the true cost, but based on what I can know with certainty given models I can run on my own machines, the numbers seem reasonable. In any case, that’s not really relevant to this discussion. Treat it as a hypothetical, then work out the math later to figure out where we want to be and what threshold we should be setting.
For me the threshold is zero. LLMs are dead ends and cannot really be improved much beyond where they are now, complete with hallucinations and techbrodude confidence.
The billions being wasted on LLMs are better spent on less idiotic technologies less likely to destroy trust in information sources.
It sounds like you don’t like how LLMs are currently used, not their power consumption.
I agree that they’re a dead end. But I also don’t think they need much improvement over what we currently have. We just need to stop jamming them where they don’t belong and leave them be where they shine.
It is possible to despise everything about LLMs from the “podcast bro” types who hype it to the environmental costs to the dangers they represent in actual use.
Very rarely in history are there inventions that have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. LLMs are shaping up to be one of them. Thankfully they’re running the hype curve on fast forward and look like they won’t actually climb the right side of it. In five years they won’t be anything but detritus on the trail of “progress”.