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0 pointsPeterisP2y ago0 comments

There are unaccounted externalities in many areas, but energy use of LLMs isn't one of them - people are paying full market price for the energy of training or using LLMs, that energy cost is large enough so that people care a LOT about it, and make intentional tradeoffs about what is worth it.

And if people vote with their wallets that they are willing to pay for a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, we should respect their choice that apparently this is what they consider a valuable use of the limited resources they have.

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atoav2y ago

Jup, and the market price for energy doesn't reflect where it is going towards, which was my point. Whether you train the LLM to predict extreme weather events or put funny hats on pictures of cats, you have to pay the same — in fact, the latter will drive the price up for the former.

Sure, there are still people out there who believe the invisible hand of the market will regulate everything to give us a good outcome despite every real world evidence to the opposite. But in a market more demand for bullshit reasons drives the prices up for everybody, also for things that are essential for the survival of the poorest, the long term sustainability of environment, health services, etc.

The question I laid out was whether it is really a good idea to treat some random bullshit the same as essential services and externalities? Especially considering we are walking into a climate catastrophe that is the result of too much energy use.

Granted, we live in a society that is kinda built on ignoring these connections — otherwise we would go mad or cynical, but lying to ourselves has a hidden cost that will come due at some point.

PeterisPOP2y ago

But as we don't have mass long-term energy storage, future energy is not exchangeable with current energy, thus the future energy cost shouldn't matter for the current training of LLMs, and whether tomorrow it will be a good use of energy to put funny hats on pictures of cats, it's something that people will be able to choose based on the availability of energy - it's up to them to decide what's essential or not, it's up to them to decide whether they are willing to sacrifice some entertainment just to save energy, and that's what they should be doing with money as the mechanism of measure - if a person wants to do something silly, it would be inappropriate for someone else to decide "no, that's random bullshit" and prohibit them to spend their resources (energy or otherwise) on it. The fact that this decision will affect the price of e.g. energy for others is NOT an externality, it's the core economic mechanism of allocating scarce resources - if some people want to spend the same resources on cat picture and they are fully paying the costs of that, then that's directly reflected in the price they're paying, not an unpriced externality.

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