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0 pointsnikisil805mo ago0 comments

I appreciate your responses to my comments, including the addition of reading material. However, I'm going to have to push back on both points.

Firstly, saying that because AI water use is on par with other industries, then we shouldn't scrutinize AI water use is a bit short-sighted. If the future Altman et al want comes to be, the shear scale of deployment of AI-focused data centers will lead to nominal water use orders of magnitude larger than other industries. Of course, on a relative scale, they can be seen as 'efficient', but even something efficient, when built out to massive scale, can suck out all of our resources. It's not AI's fault that water is a limited resource on Earth; AI is not the first industry to use a ton of water; however, eventually, with all other industries + AI combined (again, imagining the future the AI Kings want), we are definitely going 300km/h on the road to worldwide water scarcity. We are currently at a time where we need to seriously rethink our relationship with water as a society - not at a time where we can spawn whole new, extremely consumptive industries (even if, in relative terms, they're on par with what we've been doing (which isn't saying much given the state of the climate)) whose upsides are still fairly debatable and not at all proven beyond a doubt.

As for the second link, there's a pretty easy rebuke to the idea, which aligns with the other reply to your link. Sure, LLMs are more energy-efficient at generating text than human beings, but do LLMs actually create new ideas? Write new things? Any text written by an LLM will be based off of someone else's work. There is a cost to creativity - to giving birth to actual ideas - that LLMs will never be able to incur, which makes them seem more efficient, but in the end they're more efficient at (once again) tasks which us humans have provided them with plenty of examples of (like writing corporate emails! Or fairly cookie-cutter code!) but at some point the value creation is limited.

I know you disagree with me, it's ok - you are in the majority and you can feel good about that.

I honestly hope the future you foresee where LLMs solve our problems and become important building blocks to our society comes to fruition (rather than the financialized speculation tools they currently are, let's be real). If that happens, I'll be glad I was wrong.

I just don't see it happening.

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keeda5mo ago

These are important conversations to have because there is so much hyperbole in both directions that a lot of people end up having strong but misguided opinions. I think it's very helpful to consider the impact of LLMs in context (heheh) of the bigger picture rather than in isolation, because suddenly a lot of things fall into perspective.

For instance, all water use by data centers is a fraction of the water used by golf courses! If it really does comes down to the wire for conserving water, I think humanity has the option of foregoing a leisure activity for the relatively wealthy in exchange for accelerated productivity for the rest of the world.

And totally, LLMs might not be able to come up with new ideas, but they can super-charge the humans who do have ideas and want to develop them! An idea that would have taken months to be explored and developed can now be done in days. And given that like the majority of ideas fail, we would be failing that much faster too!

In either case, just eyeballing the numbers we have currently, on average the resources a human without AI assistance would have consumed to conclude an endeavor far outweighs the resources consumed by both that human and an assisting LLM.

I would agree that there will likely be significant problems caused by widespread adoption of AI, but at this point I think they would social (e.g. significant job displacement, even more wealth inequality) rather than environmental.

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keeda5mo ago

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