tl/dr: “Yes it is, but not as much as other things so stop worrying.”
What a bullshit take.
What makes this a bullshit take? Focusing attention on actual problems is a great way to make progress
I was very sceptical at first, but this article kinda convinced me. I think it still has some bad biases (it often only considers 1 chatgpt request in its comparisons, when in reality you quickly make dozens of them, it often says ‘how weird to try and save tiny amounts of energy’ when we do that already with lights when leaving rooms, water when brushing teeths, it focuses on energy (to train, cool and generate electricity) and not on logistics and hardware required), but overall two arguments got me :
- one chatgpt request seems to consume around 3Wh, which is relatively low
- even with daily billions of requests, chatbots seems to represent less than 5% of AI power consumption, which is the real problem and lies in the hand of corporates.
Still probably cant hurt to boycott that stuff, but it’d be more useful to use less social media, especially those with videos or pictures, and watch videos in 140p
Username checks out
🆗
A cheat sheet on how to argue your passion positive.
I’m not familiar with the term
Self-hosted LLMs are the way.
I actually think that (presently) self hosted LLMs are much worse for hallucination
I struggle to see why numerous scientists (and even Sam ‘AI’ Altman himself) would be wrong about this but a random substack post holds the truth.
Having read the entire post, i think there’s a misunderstanding :
- this post is about ChatGPT and LLM chatbots in general, not AI as a whole.
- This post claims to be 100% aligned with scientists and that AI as a whole is bad for the environment.
- What they claim is that chatbots are only 1-3% of AI use and yet benefit to 400 million people (rest is mostly business stuff and serves more entreprises or very specific needs), therefore they do not consume much by themselves (just like we could keep 1-3% of cars going and be just fine with environment)
this reeks of AI slop
No it doesn’t
Even Sam Altman acknowledged last year the huge amount of energy needed by chatgpt, and the need for a breakthrough in energy breakthrough…
Do you hold Sam Altman’s opinion higher than the reasoning here? In general or just on this particular take?
What would Altman gain from overstating the environmental impact of his own company?
What if power consumption is not so much limited by the software’s appetite, but rather by the hardware’s capabilities?
What would Altman gain from overstating the environmental impact of his own company?
You should consider the possibility that CEOs of big companies essentially always think very hard about how to talk about everything so that it always benefits them
I can see the benefits, I can try to explain if you’re actually interested
What weighs more: the cost of taking people at their word, or the effort it takes to interpret the subtext of every interaction?
I don’t understand the nature of your question
You seem to spend a lot of energy questioning people’s intentions, inventing reasons to question whether people’s intentions toward you are genuine. Some do deserve to be questioned, no doubt. It just seems draining, and for what goal?
Do you aim to be the sole determiner of truth? To never be duped again? To sharpen your skills as an investigator?
How much more creative energy could you put into the world by taking people at their word in all but the highest risk cases?
Stoic desire to be informed and to be a force of good for others with like intentions
Is environmental impact on the top of anyones list for why they don’t like ChatGPT? It’s not on mine nor on anyones I have talked to.
The two most common reasons I hear are 1) no trust in the companies hosting the tools to protect consumers and 2) rampant theft of IP to train LLM models.
The author moves away from strict environmental focus despite claims to the contrary in their intro,
This post is not about the broader climate impacts of AI beyond chatbots, or about whether AI is bad for other reasons
[…]
Other Objections, This is all a gimmick anyway. Why not just use Google? ChatGPT doesn’t give better information
… yet doesn’t address the most common criticisms.
Worse, the author accuses anyone who pauses to think of the negatives of ChatGPT of being absurdly illogical.
Being around a lot of adults freaking out over 3 Wh feels like I’m in a dream reality. It has the logic of a bad dream. Everyone is suddenly fixating on this absurd concept or rule that you can’t get a grasp of, and scolding you for not seeing the same thing. Posting long blog posts is my attempt to get out of the weird dream reality this discourse has created.
IDK what logical fallacy this is but claiming people are “freaking out over 3Wh” is very disingenuous.
Rating as basic content: 2/10, poor and disingenuous argument
Rating as example of AI writing: 5/10, I’ve certainly seen worse AI slop
The two most common reasons I hear are 1) no trust in the companies hosting the tools to protect consumers and 2) rampant theft of IP to train LLM models.
My reason is that you can’t trust the answers regardless. Hallucinations are a rampant problem. Even if we managed to cut it down to 1/100 query will hallucinate, you can’t trust ANYTHING. We’ve seen well trained and targeted AIs that don’t directly take user input (so can’t be super manipulated) in google search results recommending that people put glue on their pizzas to make the cheese stick better… or that geologists recommend eating a rock a day.
If a custom tailored AI can’t cut it… the general ones are not going to be all that valuable without significant external validation/moderation.
Basically no. What you’re calling tailored AI is actually low cost AI. You’ll be hard pressed, on the other hand, to get ChatGPT o3 to hallucinate at all
No, not basically no.
https://mashable.com/article/openai-o3-o4-mini-hallucinate-higher-previous-models
By OpenAI’s own testing, its newest reasoning models, o3 and o4-mini, hallucinate significantly higher than o1.
Stop spreading misinformation. The company itself acknowledges that it hallucinates more than previous models.
I stand corrected thank you for sharing
I was commenting based on anecdotal experience and I didn’t know where was a test specifically for this
I do notice that o3 is more overconfident and tends to find a source online from some forum and treat it as gospel
Which, while not correct, I would not treat as hallucination
There is also the argument that a downpour of AI generated slop is making the Internet in general less usable, hurting everyone (except the slop makers) by making true or genuine information harder to find and verify.
What exactly is the argument?
Thank you for your considered and articulate comment
What do you think about the significant difference in attitude between comments here and in (quite serious) programming communities like https://lobste.rs/s/bxixuu/cheat_sheet_for_why_using_chatgpt_is_not
Are we in different echo chambers? Is chatgpt a uniquely powerful tool for programmers? Is social media a fundamentally Luddite mechanism?
I’m curious if you can articulate the difference between being critical of how a particular technology is owned and managed versus being a Luddite?
I think I’m on board with arguing against how LLMs are being owned and managed, so I don’t really have much to say
I would say GitHub copilot ( that uses a gpt model ) uses more Wh than chatgpt, because it gets blasted more queries on average because the “AI” autocomplete just triggers almost every time you stop typing or on random occasions.
I don’t think this answers the question
I don’t think this answers the question
They’re specifically showing you that in the use case you asked about the assertions must change. Your question is bad for the case that you’re specifically asking about.
So no, it doesn’t answer the question… But your question has a bunch more caveats that must be accounted for that you’re just straight up missing.
No that is not how reasoned debate works, you have to articulate your argument lest you’re just sloppily babbling talking points
If the premise of your argument is fundamentally flawed, then you’re not having a reasoned debate. You just a zealot.
Please articulate why the premise of my argument is fundamentally flawed
