Bitcoin is a good analog because the goal was to create durable trust. The energy utilization is just a means to an end of fairly distributing new tokens to members of the network. There are many other schemes they could use and have considered adopting. The energy use is not necessary, it’s sufficient.
Oh, and neural networks doing a huge number of floating point operations per word is not energy-heavy?
Training these neural networks every few months isn’t energy-heavy?
Both Bitcoin and these large models weren’t “designed to be energy-heavy”. It was a consequence of first-gen design decisions to solve a specific problem. Then as time went on, costs went down and they became a huge outlier in terms of energy. The question is whether the bagholders (the AI companies that invested untild amounts into the initial training) will fight to keep people using their tech and fearmonger about everything else.
Bitcoin is pretty much explicitly designed to use as much electricity as the market will allow, without becoming any more useful. If you removed 99% of the miners from the current system, Bitcoin will still be exactly the same - it won't be any faster or slower, and the same number of transactions will flow through. The cost of electricity serves only as a lower bound on the expected value of a coin.
Neural nets on the other hand generally show more capability as you add more compute power. There's a point where it's less valuable than the cost increase, so people don't do more than that, but it isn't constant value like Bitcoin.
Bitcoin is a good analog because the goal was to create durable trust. The energy utilization is just a means to an end of fairly distributing new tokens to members of the network. There are many other schemes they could use and have considered adopting. The energy use is not necessary, it’s sufficient.
Oh, and neural networks doing a huge number of floating point operations per word is not energy-heavy?
Training these neural networks every few months isn’t energy-heavy?
Both Bitcoin and these large models weren’t “designed to be energy-heavy”. It was a consequence of first-gen design decisions to solve a specific problem. Then as time went on, costs went down and they became a huge outlier in terms of energy. The question is whether the bagholders (the AI companies that invested untild amounts into the initial training) will fight to keep people using their tech and fearmonger about everything else.
Bitcoin is pretty much explicitly designed to use as much electricity as the market will allow, without becoming any more useful. If you removed 99% of the miners from the current system, Bitcoin will still be exactly the same - it won't be any faster or slower, and the same number of transactions will flow through. The cost of electricity serves only as a lower bound on the expected value of a coin.
Neural nets on the other hand generally show more capability as you add more compute power. There's a point where it's less valuable than the cost increase, so people don't do more than that, but it isn't constant value like Bitcoin.