Comment by moritzwarhier
4 hours ago
Writing about AI, destroying the planet for data centers, there's a lot of money to be made.
That being said, AI seems kind of miraculous sometimes.
Similar to cars. So enticing that we make everything else in the world worse in order to maximize the profit, make it indispensable, subsidize it, and make the dependency on it irreversible.
And it's not even something to blame individual people for.
Driving away from all the other cars to spend a weekend feels like freedom.
Using AI to answer a question feels like a "bicycle for the mind".
But in fact it's more like a car. It requires massive resources and creates perverse incentives, and the result is ineffective and corrupt.
Both cars and AI are amazing technology and extremely useful, but using them is not an individual responsibility. It requires societal subsidy.
The environmental impact of answering a question on an obscure topic with ai model is less than an the impact of answering the question with an hour-long google search hunting for references or a drive to the public library.
That's true, and I am not anti-AI. I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.
Neither did I want to say that a car is always more wasteful than some alternative.
But defaulting to the behemoth is inefficient, unless everyone is driven to do it: then it's in some way reasonable.
By adding "corrupt" and "dependent", as well as the economic terms, I wanted to offer a broader critique and create an analogy, not just talk about energy usage on its own.
What I had in mind was: it's easier to go many places that are a mile or less from me, by car. Because everything is obstructed by cars. And I'm atrophied by lack of movement. Best would be to drive somewhere to move/walk.
People already do that in masses.
And doing shopping by car, because everything else seems unbearable, also takes away your time, apart from wasting energy compared to more, smaller shops that would be reachable by foot, bycicle etc.
I guess you know the argument.
Today, people's thinking atrophies because their LLM is probably right in their summarization of some Wikipedia article, plus 2-3 other random sources.
Or so.
Using the Wikipedia search function is not expensive.
But, I mostly had a bigger picture in mind than what is the cost of inference.
I think it's a good analogy in many ways, and personally I think car-centric society has a lot of flaws. I think the ease that AI brings to tasks may erode mental capabilities in the same way cars have eroded our collective physical health.* That said, it doesn't seem to me that we would be better off without cars altogether, despite all the related issues.
I am concerned about the environmental impacts that AI poses, but they don't seem to me to be so catastrophic. Solar and battery tech has made enormous leaps in the past couple decades, and we will need to pivot to clean energy future irrespective of AI.
*This said, I have become gradually more alarmed over the past decade at the lack of epistemological rigor in the general public, as made apparent through the rise of social media. I don't know that AI becoming a truth-seeking crutch for people wouldn't be more good than bad.
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> I was not only thinking about the environmental effects of some single prompt or a certain amount of tokens.
Hand wringing about AI datacenter's environmental impact is well and good. We should keep the data centers accountable for their consumption and waste.
I just wish the same people had been upset the last 20 years with poor water resource management in a lot of areas (the west US especially) with urban, ranching and farming development.
> That's true, and I am not anti-AI.
Me neither!
It's like saying if we didn't have cheap commercial flights people would travel by foot anyways and would consume more resources for food &co. than the plane would consume in fuel...
80% of generative AI queries wouldn't even exist as google searches.
To be clear, your position here is that insurmountable barriers to information is the preferable state of the world?
One claim of the parent comment was that AI is ineffective. For the purpose of finding answers to questions, it is more resource-efficient than the alternatives, and, to your point, capable of answering questions that were impossible to answer via other means before. In what way is that ineffective?
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I do plenty of AI queries, both pragmatic ones and some for entertainment: witnessing talktotransformer was mind-bending already at the time! And since then, I've tried frontier models, local, coding agents, and use plenty of them on the regular.
I awe at the capabilites of generative AI.
I also enjoy sitting in or driving a car.
I did not want to make a moral argument, unless you consider each and every form of utilitarianism as moralism.
That might be true, but at least I started asking way more questions since we’ve had competent LLMs.
Vonnegut said in his last living work that the greatest addiction modern people face is the drug of cheap oil.
We got addicted to the convenience and overuse, and have started a mass extinction event because of it.
The perverse incentives will come for us all.
It is exactly this thought, in the form of this sentence, that could replace almost all of my comments in this thread.
It feels depressing, but I think the same. When thinking about the larger world, it becomes increasingly hard to ignore. And of course it is not new.
There were "doomers" already in the midst of the 20th century, but it doesn't mean that they were wrong.
I agree with your message but not sure about the conclusion. Cars themselves are commodified luxury available (in the US pretty much required) to everyone, and they do need to be subsidized, both in terms of infrastructure and the lifestyle they require.
But with AI what is the exact price? My understanding is that R&D is extremely expensive, but running non-SOTA models is not that bad. We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications.
Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
Thanks for asking an open question about my point.
First, because I initially failed to answer your more closed questions (this paragraph is edited in):
> We are getting pretty close to models which can be useful locally in many applications. Or do you mean that at scale running them locally is not possible and hence the infrastructure price is in data centers, which will be expensive to maintain and scale for demand?
I don't think there's a way around making the best of AI capabilities with minimum price and maximum control, and I'd agree this is met by on-prem data centers, just not in a rationally targeted way.
Back to my original comment:
Because it (my conclusion) was not so clear, and maybe I just wanted to highlight some observations without delivering a real argument for or against things [, I thank you for your open question].
The utility/leverage aspect for AI seems more esoteric than the one for cars because, apart from Chatbots, it's more hidden.
And also, similar to cars (or many other phenomena of industrialization), yes, my first vague point was the subsidization of infrastructure. But also, the power gap: that's something not only associated with AI or cars, but with a lot of technologies we all hold dear: sewage, powerline, logistics, etc etc.
What reminds me of cars in the current AI frenzy is the fixation on cementing infrastructure. And also, I think, a lot more people agree on, for example, some kind of universal right to, for example, clean water.
But all of industrialization confronts people with questions of efficiency, inequality, and collective support.
Most people would, for example, support a right to get a minimum amount of clean water when you are living and working in a tradionally inhabited space (if you're on the social-darwinist side) or at least not harming society (if you're more of a social democrat).
And, similar to the buildup of car infrastructure, and the procurement of resources, space etc for maximum building, giant data centers can obstruct people in buying drinking water. Or walking outside (AI obstructs traditional methods of online collaboration).