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Comment by sneak

2 years ago

I think people have underestimated the environmental impact of training AI models.

While one can argue things like GPT3/4 are useful, the question becomes how useful are they if they burn up gigawatthours to do it?

GPT3 alone took around 334MWh to train, and that's one model from one company, and that's just for training, not usage.

We should be focusing on making power cheaper and more accessible to everyone, not policing what people do with the power they have purchased.

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sneak

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monero-xmr  2 years ago

This is why judging the usage of electricity is a fool’s errand. The market has a price, and if I want to use it to heat my pool and power my air conditioners that’s my choice. The government should not prevent me from heating if a coat is sufficient, nor cooling if being naked is sufficient, if I’m willing to pay. If that argument makes sense, then using it to play video games, train LLMs, or mine crypto is simply a choice the market makes.

  • sneak  2 years ago

    There are externalities of power consumption for which regulation (in the case of a single monopoly power grid, as is the case here) makes sense.

    Large scale usage affects grid stability at specific occasional times. If it were just individual homes doing small scale mining across the grid, it would be different, but one can make a good argument that large scale crypto miner operations should be prioritized for unilateral load shedding in times of grid instability.

    The power grid as currently designed and deployed in Texas is a shared resource and needs to be centrally managed to avoid tragedy of the commons situations.

    If crypto miners don't like the shared rules for the shared resources, there's nothing stopping them from deploying their own wind, solar, and optionally storage.

    Being connected to the public grid comes with benefits, and those benefits come with conditions of use, ideally set by consensus of everyone who benefits from and funds the grid.

    • monero-xmr  2 years ago

      I’m in agreement for that. But a total ban on crypto mining is absurd to me. It’s such a singling out of an industry, when so much IMO has no societal utility, that the only reason it could be banned is elite obsession.

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