Comment by Anon1096
2 hours ago
Calling #2 more sustainable has no basis in reality, it's just a feeling. It's like saying that clothing before the loom or farming before the tractor were "more sustainable". No, it isn't, it just appeals to yeoman farmer instincts that somehow technology=bad when it's what powers (and sustains) our modern world of 8 billion people.
Given that #1 seems to be based almost entirely on stealing from #2, and never paying reparations, I’d say it’s pretty unsustainable.
It’s like saying robbing banks for a living isn’t sustainable and working at a bank is. That’s not exactly a stretch.
#1 may well put #2 out of a living but that isn't the same as stealing and doesn't (at least in and of itself) make it unsustainable. The fact that models were trained on scraped content isn't a matter of technical necessity but rather the path of least resistance (lowest cost in this case). Synthetic data is increasingly used for reasons of quantity, quality, and various technical considerations.
All of the major players in AI currently, literally stole to build their models. There isn’t one out there that hasn’t. So yes, it is the same as stealing because they were LITERALLY, in the literal sense, stealing.
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It's sustainable in the literal sense, I.E. a tailor can simply tailor forever without needing to constantly worry about keeping up with new tools or technologies, or needing to upgrade or change their methodology constantly.
The tech world is obsessed with moving fast and breaking things, and you can't just do the same thing forever and expect it to always work.
Think about how much food we throw away in the developed and developing worlds. How often we buy new clothing when we could mend old clothing. How often we ask for more when we could do with less. How often we want to eat at a restaurant when we could make leftovers. How often we want something sweet when we could just eat something bland. How often we heat and cool our homes when we could wear more or less clothing.
It turns out that while these are all truisms, nobody wants to fix them. Developed countries are okay passing pigovian taxes, to a limited extent, to help fix these problems. Developing countries are even less interested in fixing these problems. It turns out that austerity is incredibly unpopular. Everyone wants to tell other people not to do the things they don't like but nobody wants to listen to what other people tell them not to do.
Just a reminder that Europe colonized Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the search for spices. Later on the interest changed to tea. Literally the only thing that Europe wanted was better tasting food and drink (initially at least.) By the time the potato had become widespread, they could have had enough calories to feed the continent, and yet the desire for flavor is what lead to untold misery for hundreds of years for millions of people.
We need to be realistic about what works and what doesn't. Austerity never wins.
“More sustainable” than burning hydrocarbons to produce chatbot tokens. Humanity could sustain itself on those resources much longer if we were more careful with them. The very definition of sustainability.
It allows for our modern unsustainable world of 8 billion people you mean?