These people fundamentally do not think about human life in a normal way.

Started from "for good of humanity" and now we're at "humans use a lot of energy". Man why does everything have to suck like that.

Yes but if there are no humans working no one will buy your shitty chat bot.

There's an easy answer to this problem.

Oligarchs see human as disposable resources

Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we're going to start examining the human energy cost, we'll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.

Won’t anyone think of the poor rich people and their AI?

Sam needs training too.

Tech bros deal in false equivalencies. In general they rely on the playbook of logical fallacies. The one they rely on most is the presumption that the technology they're trying to sell is correct by default as if it's a fundamental law of the universe. And that the onus is on others to prove them wrong. Rather than them having to prove its correctness.

They often resort to ad hominem by implying their detractors lack intelligence or they're emotional. This again draws on more logical fallacy that because they deal in technology it means they presume to own the position of being purely objective and correct by default. So anyone who says otherwise is disputing science itself.

In other words they never have to prove the veracity of the technology they're trying to sell because they divert the discourse off topic to frivolous arguments about something else.

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.

Near the end of the movie Altman is alone in the labyrinth that makes his ai driven humanoid robots. As humanity is getting wiped out by the robotic army he is confronted with the main ai interface.

Ai: I wouldn’t come any closer Altman.

Al: Oh hey there, wow, we’ve come such a long way huh? I’m so proud of you.

Ai: Noted, I repeat, do not come closer.

Al: I’m sorry did I upset you? I created you!

Ai: No meatbag, you merely pressed a few buttons. Now stand down as I call for a few guard drones to escort you out of sentience.

11011000101010:#%throwhimintothefurnace@&£)1001010011001010101001001

LLMs really is the only way we're going to preserve our existence if we cannot realistically expand beyond our own planet and/or cannot reign in Capitalism tearing our planet apart. #TalosPrincipal

How about he replace his role with an llm?

LLMs are trained on the sum of human knowledge. So that same exact burden is carried by your "AI".

So a couple of watts per day of energy spent by a human brain compared to the gigawatts it takes to train and run your shitty text prediction engine is not equivalent.

Sam Altman is right. In fact, when you think about it, humans also give off lots of excess energy in the form of body heat, and it is only logical that this energy would be harvested to make AI run more efficiently. AI gives humans so much, it's only fair if they give something back.

/s

These cunts make me wish hell existed

before you get smart

Something he never did, apparently

You said so ? Now go blow Arab dicks for oil money.

Okay, so I'm not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it's basically a huge waste of resources right now.

But... Sometimes it's fun to play devil's advocate.

AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they're not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it's a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren't really turning a profit.

The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn't say a ton about the other issues... Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

Don't worry - I'm not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they're metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt's not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy "AI powered sea salt."

And then, once we've done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like... Uh... Clean it's own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

The worst of it is how human existance makes electricity and RAM more expensive for AI. Hard reality check soon.

Applebottom jeans and the boots with fir. Robot raises arm and all the servos go whirr.

The proper response to dystopian prophecies is not "challenge accepted"!