Save The Planet
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You can also use alternatives like startpage and ecosia which use google results, I believe.
Both of which are probably training their own AI as middle men or stealing your search terms to tell Walmart what type of peanut butter you're most likely to buy if they could lock it up on a plastic covered shelve.
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Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Firefox has a plugin that blocks the AI results. It works pretty well most of the time, but it occasionally has hiccups when Google updates stuff or something.
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How is it any worse than crypto farms, or streaming services?
These two things are so different.
Streaming services are extremely efficient; they tend to be encode-once and decode-on-user's-device. Video was for a long time considered a tough thing to serve, so engineers put tons of effort into making it efficient.
Crypto currency is literally designed to be as wasteful as possible while still being feasible. "Proof-of-work" (how Bitcoin and many other currencies operate) literally means that crypto mining algorithms must waste as much computation as they can get away with doing pointless operations just to say they tried. It's an abomination.
I legit don't know much about tech, and it ts showing. I didn't know streaming was so efficient.
What I. Trying to get at (I still have to read that article in the parent comment) is that how is AI any worse than crypto? As far as I can tell crypto impact, while bad, was relatively minor and it drastically decreased in popularity; it's kind of logical AI does the same, unless it's impact is way higher.
Meanwhile we have cargo ships burning bunker crude .
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Let's not forget billionaires in this consideration.
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I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.
Otherwise it's a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
If you consume energy during peak hours you are a peak load consumer. Consuming in other hours doesn't change this fact.
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I watch big state and national grid loads (for fun) and I see two distinct peaks: 7-8AM when everyone goes to work, and then around 5-7 PM when people commute home and heat up dinner.
Otherwise it's a linear diagonal curve coinciding with temperatures.
I personally try to keep my own energy usage a completely flat line so I can benefit from baseline load generator plants like nuclear (located not that far away).
Your personal energy use pattern does not determine where you are drawing your power from, wtf logic is this?
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I legit don't know much about tech, and it ts showing. I didn't know streaming was so efficient.
What I. Trying to get at (I still have to read that article in the parent comment) is that how is AI any worse than crypto? As far as I can tell crypto impact, while bad, was relatively minor and it drastically decreased in popularity; it's kind of logical AI does the same, unless it's impact is way higher.
Meanwhile we have cargo ships burning bunker crude .
If you are expecting AI to not have much impact and turn out to be a bubble, then I guess there isn't much reason to believe it it will have much environmental impact. If you expect AI to not be a fad, then yeah it could have big environmental consequences if we can't find renewable power and coolant. If AI is all it is hyped up to be, then it would dwarf the rest of humanity's power consumption down to a footnote. So it really depends on how bullish you are about AI, or at least how bullish you expect the market to be going forward.
Regarding proof-of-work crypto, well, bitcoin is currently at its all-time high in terms of value, exceeding USD$100k/BTC. So I'm not sure I exactly buy the idea that it's less popular, though perhaps people aren't reporting on it as much. If the power consumption of crypto has levelled off, which I don't know if it has, then it might be because it's expensive to build a mining rig and the yield goes down over time as more bitcoin is mined. (It's presumably true of other proof-of-work crypto, too, but as more BTC is mined, the marginal yield of mining more BTC decreases.)
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You're way overcomplicating how it could be done. The argument is that training takes more energy:
Typically if you have a single cost associated with a service, then you amortize that cost over the life of the service: so you take the total energy consumption of training and divide it by the total number of user-hours spent doing inference, and compare that to the cost of a single user running inference for an hour (which they can estimate by the number of user-hours in an hour divided by their global inference energy consumption for that hour).
If these are "apples to orange" comparisons, then why do people defending AI usage (and you) keep making the comparison?
But even if it was true that training is significantly more expensive that inference, or that they're inherently incomparable, that doesn't actually change the underlying observation that inference is still quite energy intensive, and the implicit value statement that the energy spent isn't worth the affect on society
That's a good point. I rescind my argument that training is necessarily more expensive than sum-of-all-deployment.
I still think people overestimate the power draw of AI though, because they're not dividing it by the overall usage of AI. If people started playing high-end video games at the same rate AI is being used, the power usage might be comparable, but it wouldn't mean that an individual playing a video game is suddenly worse for the environment than it was before. However, it doesn't really matter, since ultimately the environmental impact depends only on the total amount of power (and coolant) used, and where that power comes from (could be coal, could be nuclear, could be hydro).
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If you are expecting AI to not have much impact and turn out to be a bubble, then I guess there isn't much reason to believe it it will have much environmental impact. If you expect AI to not be a fad, then yeah it could have big environmental consequences if we can't find renewable power and coolant. If AI is all it is hyped up to be, then it would dwarf the rest of humanity's power consumption down to a footnote. So it really depends on how bullish you are about AI, or at least how bullish you expect the market to be going forward.
Regarding proof-of-work crypto, well, bitcoin is currently at its all-time high in terms of value, exceeding USD$100k/BTC. So I'm not sure I exactly buy the idea that it's less popular, though perhaps people aren't reporting on it as much. If the power consumption of crypto has levelled off, which I don't know if it has, then it might be because it's expensive to build a mining rig and the yield goes down over time as more bitcoin is mined. (It's presumably true of other proof-of-work crypto, too, but as more BTC is mined, the marginal yield of mining more BTC decreases.)
Honestly, all of this is really interesting. It's a whole side of humanity that I very much do NOT think about or follow. I previously spent the last decade much, much, too busy stomping through the forest, so I really didn't follow anything during that time. A new game or phone came out? sure, cool, I might look that up. When I finally emerged from the fens, sodden and fly-bitten, I was very much out of the loop, despite the algorithm trying to cram articles about NFTs, crypto etc., down my throat. I actually tend to avoid tech stuff because it's too much of a learning curve at this point. I get the fundamentals, but beyond that I don't dig in.
I agree with you on the bubble - it depends on the size. I guess my original take is how could it actually get bigger than it is? I just don't see how it can scale beyond begin in phones or used in basic data analysis/like another google. The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency. We're also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Meanwhile (and not to detract from the environmental concerns AI could pose) we have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing. Millions of cubic metres of sulphur are sitting in stockpiles in northern Alberta, and threatening the Athabasca river. That's not even close to the top of the list of things we need to focus on before we can get out in front of the damage AI can cause.
We're in a real mess.
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Both of which are probably training their own AI as middle men or stealing your search terms to tell Walmart what type of peanut butter you're most likely to buy if they could lock it up on a plastic covered shelve.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Probably, but neither automatically opt into AI replies. Ecosia has an AI chat, but it doesn't run until you go to it. Startpage has no AI option that I can see.
Ecosia has the upside of planting trees depending on user search rate. Not sure how true that is, though. I prefer startpage either way. Startpage claims to be privacy first, and I've never received tailored results or ads.
That doesn't mean they don't sell info. We can't know that for sure, but it sure as hell beats using Google and it's automatic AI searching.
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Honestly, all of this is really interesting. It's a whole side of humanity that I very much do NOT think about or follow. I previously spent the last decade much, much, too busy stomping through the forest, so I really didn't follow anything during that time. A new game or phone came out? sure, cool, I might look that up. When I finally emerged from the fens, sodden and fly-bitten, I was very much out of the loop, despite the algorithm trying to cram articles about NFTs, crypto etc., down my throat. I actually tend to avoid tech stuff because it's too much of a learning curve at this point. I get the fundamentals, but beyond that I don't dig in.
I agree with you on the bubble - it depends on the size. I guess my original take is how could it actually get bigger than it is? I just don't see how it can scale beyond begin in phones or used in basic data analysis/like another google. The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency. We're also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Meanwhile (and not to detract from the environmental concerns AI could pose) we have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing. Millions of cubic metres of sulphur are sitting in stockpiles in northern Alberta, and threatening the Athabasca river. That's not even close to the top of the list of things we need to focus on before we can get out in front of the damage AI can cause.
We're in a real mess.
The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency.
This is what AI researchers/pundits believed until roughly 2020, when it was discovered you could brute force your way to have more advanced AIs (so-called "scaling laws") just by massively scaling up existing algorithms. That's essentially what tech companies have been doing ever since. Nobody knows what the limit on this is going to be, but as far as I know nobody has any good evidence to suggest that we're near the limit of what's going to be possible with scaling.
We’re also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Quantum computing is not faster than regular computers. Quantum computing has efficiency advantages for some particular algorithms, such as breaking certain types of encryption. As far as I'm aware, nobody is really looking to replace computers with quantum computers in general. Even if they did, I don't think anyone has thought of a way to accelerate AI using quantum computing. Even if there were a way to, it would presumably require quantum computers like, 15 orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we have today.
We have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing.
Yeah. I don't think AI is really at the highest level of concern for environmental impact, especially since it is looking plausible it will lead to investing in nuclear power, which would be a net positive IMO. (Coolant could still be an issue though.)
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Could someone please help me save some power and just post the image with the 5tits so I don't need to have it regenerated de novo?
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Worse is Google that insists on shoving a terrible AI-based result in your face every time you do a search, with no way to turn it off.
I'm not telling these systems to generate images of cow-like girls, but I'm getting AI shoved in my face all the time whether I want it or not. (I don't).
Piling on to the google alternatives heap: https://searx.space/
You can pick a public instance of searxng and choose which engines it queries by going to the setting cog, then Engines. A few of these public instances I've checked out have only google enabled, though, so you really do need to check the settings.
If you want to add a searxng instance as your default engine and your browser doesn't automatically do it, the URL for that is:
https://<searxng_url>/search?q=%sI have to add this manually for things like ironfox/firefox mobile.
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The AIs can definitely get more advanced, sure, but with that should come some sort of efficiency.
This is what AI researchers/pundits believed until roughly 2020, when it was discovered you could brute force your way to have more advanced AIs (so-called "scaling laws") just by massively scaling up existing algorithms. That's essentially what tech companies have been doing ever since. Nobody knows what the limit on this is going to be, but as far as I know nobody has any good evidence to suggest that we're near the limit of what's going to be possible with scaling.
We’re also seemingly on the cusp of quantum computing, which I imagine would reduce power requirements.
Quantum computing is not faster than regular computers. Quantum computing has efficiency advantages for some particular algorithms, such as breaking certain types of encryption. As far as I'm aware, nobody is really looking to replace computers with quantum computers in general. Even if they did, I don't think anyone has thought of a way to accelerate AI using quantum computing. Even if there were a way to, it would presumably require quantum computers like, 15 orders of magnitude more powerful than the ones we have today.
We have very, very real and very, very large environmental concerns that need addressing.
Yeah. I don't think AI is really at the highest level of concern for environmental impact, especially since it is looking plausible it will lead to investing in nuclear power, which would be a net positive IMO. (Coolant could still be an issue though.)
How do they brute force their way to a better algorithm? Just trial and error? How do they check outcomes to determine that their new model is good?
I don't expect you to answer those musings - you've been more than patient with me.
Honestly, I'm a tree hugger, and the fact that we aren't going for nuclear simply because of smear campaigns and changes in public opinion is insanity. We already treat some mining wastes in perpetuity, or plan to have them entombed for the rest of time - how is nuclear waste any different?
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That's a good point. I rescind my argument that training is necessarily more expensive than sum-of-all-deployment.
I still think people overestimate the power draw of AI though, because they're not dividing it by the overall usage of AI. If people started playing high-end video games at the same rate AI is being used, the power usage might be comparable, but it wouldn't mean that an individual playing a video game is suddenly worse for the environment than it was before. However, it doesn't really matter, since ultimately the environmental impact depends only on the total amount of power (and coolant) used, and where that power comes from (could be coal, could be nuclear, could be hydro).
You're absolutely right that the environmental impact depends on the source of the energy, and less obviously, by the displaced demand that now has to seek energy from less clean sources. Ideally we should have lots of clean energy, but unfortunately we often don't, and even when AI uses clean sources, they're often just forcing preexisting load elsewhere. If we can start investing in power infrastructure projects at the national (or state/province level) then maybe it wouldn't be so bad, but it never happens at a scale that we need.
I think the argument isn't the environmental impact alone, it's the judgement about the net benefit of both the environmental impact and the product produced. I think the statement is "we spent all this power, and for what? Some cats with tits and an absolutely destroyed labour market. Not worth the cost"
Especially because it's a cost that the users of AI are forcing everyone to pay. Privatize profits, socialize losses, and all that. -
It's literally the same thing, the obvious difference is how much usage it's getting at a time per gpu, but everyone seems to assume all these data centers are running at full load at all times for some reason?
It's explicitly and literally not the same thing.
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All of them at their disposal, we should get rid of all tools
Running a concept to its extreme just to try and dismiss it to sound smart is an entire damn logical fallacy. Why are you insisting on using fallacies that brainless morons use?
Have you never heard of a straw man fallacy? That's you. That's what you're doing.
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You're absolutely right that the environmental impact depends on the source of the energy, and less obviously, by the displaced demand that now has to seek energy from less clean sources. Ideally we should have lots of clean energy, but unfortunately we often don't, and even when AI uses clean sources, they're often just forcing preexisting load elsewhere. If we can start investing in power infrastructure projects at the national (or state/province level) then maybe it wouldn't be so bad, but it never happens at a scale that we need.
I think the argument isn't the environmental impact alone, it's the judgement about the net benefit of both the environmental impact and the product produced. I think the statement is "we spent all this power, and for what? Some cats with tits and an absolutely destroyed labour market. Not worth the cost"
Especially because it's a cost that the users of AI are forcing everyone to pay. Privatize profits, socialize losses, and all that.I think a different way to look at what you've brought up in the second paragraph is that people are angry and talking about the power usage because the dislike AI, not the other way around. It doesn't really make sense for people to be angry about the power usage of AI if the power usage had no environmental impact.
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How do they brute force their way to a better algorithm? Just trial and error? How do they check outcomes to determine that their new model is good?
I don't expect you to answer those musings - you've been more than patient with me.
Honestly, I'm a tree hugger, and the fact that we aren't going for nuclear simply because of smear campaigns and changes in public opinion is insanity. We already treat some mining wastes in perpetuity, or plan to have them entombed for the rest of time - how is nuclear waste any different?
It's not brute-force to a better algorithm per se. It's the same algorithm, exactly as "stupid," just with more force (more numerous and powerful GPUs) running it.
Three are benchmarks to check if the model is "good" -- for instance, how well the model does on standardized tests similar to SATs (researchers are very careful to ensure that the questions do not appear on the internet anywhere, so that the model can't just memorize the answers.)
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I had my energy company remove their LVTC smart meter this week after they started using it to shut off our condenser unit during our 100 degree days
The fact that it exists at all is bad enough, but they were doing this at a time when our AC was already malfunctioning due to low refrigerant. On the day they first shut it off, our house reached 94 degrees.
The program that the previous owner signed up for that enabled them to do this gave them a fucking two dollar a month discount.
I use a smart thermostat to optimize my home conditioning - having a second meter fucking with my schedule ends up making us all miserable. Energy providers need to stop fucking around and just build out their infrastructure to handle worst case peak loads, and enable customers to install solar to reduce peak loading to begin with.
The other thing that kills me about this is that our provider administers our city's solar electric subsidy program themselves. When i had them come out to give us a quote, they inflated their price by more than 100% because they knew what our electricity bill was. All they did was take our average monthly bill and multiplied it by the repayment period. I could have been providing them more energy to the grid at their peak load if they hadn't tried scamming me.
FUCK private energy providers.
wrote last edited by [email protected]Smart meters with this ability are great, when done well. Without them they have the ability to turn off all of your power if they need to. If they can't keep up with demand, they have to turn things off. It's better for them to have the ability to shut off a few appliances or decrease your AC usage rather than shut people down entirely.
People always complain that they don't want to give the energy company power over their electricity, but they already do. However, without this their power is total, and only total. With it they can moderate it. It's better if everyone has a smart meter instead of only people who care about others, and greedy people only look out for themselves.
I agree though, fuck private providers.
