[HN Gopher] AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
___________________________________________________________________
AGI fantasy is a blocker to actual engineering
Author : tomwphillips
Score : 513 points
Date : 2025-11-14 13:21 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.tomwphillips.co.uk)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.tomwphillips.co.uk)
| Etheryte wrote:
| Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the idea
| that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end. Many have also gone on and
| started companies to look for a new way forward. However, if
| you're hip deep in stock options, along with your reputation,
| you'll hardly want to break the mirage. So here we are.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look like
| but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a
| dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it. The
| people working on AI are very smart and they will solve the
| associated challenges soon enough. The problem of how to slow
| down the development of these technologies- a political
| problem- is much more pressing right now.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| By the way downvoting me will not hurt my feelings and I
| understand why you are doing it, I don't care if you believe
| me or not. In your position I certainly would think the same
| thing you are. Its fine. The future will come soon enough
| without my help.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You're being downvoted for displaying the kind of
| overconfidence that people consider shameful.
|
| Everyone in ML has seen dozens to thousands of instances of
| "I have a radical new idea that will result in a total AI
| breakthrough" already. Ever wondered why the real
| breakthroughs are so few and far in between?
| fallingfrog wrote:
| I know how it looks. I shouldn't have said anything- it
| was pointless.
|
| At any rate someone else will figure out what i know soon
| or already has.
| chriswarbo wrote:
| > I have some idea of what the way forward is going to look
| like but I don't want to accelerate the development of such a
| dangerous technology so I haven't told anyone about it.
|
| Ever since "AI" was named at Dartmouth, there have been very
| smart people thinking that their idea will be the thing which
| makes it work this time. Usually, those ideas work really
| well in-the-small (ELIZA, SHRDLU, Automated Mathematician,
| etc.), but don't scale to useful problem sizes.
|
| So, unless you've built a _full-scale_ implementation of your
| ideas, I wouldn 't put too much faith in them if I were you.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Far more common are ideas that don't work on any scale at
| all.
|
| If you have something that gives a sticky +5% at 250M
| scale, you might have an actual winner. Almost all new ML
| ideas fall well short of that.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| If someone else comes along and makes the exact claim I
| just made, I won't believe it either
| fallingfrog wrote:
| 999999 times out of a million you'd be right.
|
| But, I shouldn't have said anything.
| titzer wrote:
| Let me guess, you have a truly marvelous demonstration of
| this proposition which this margin is too narrow to contain.
| fallingfrog wrote:
| Well it kind of sucks honestly because im never going to
| get any sort of recognition, but that's partly by choice
| and partly because I don't have the right personal
| connections. I 100% understand why all of you think I'm a
| significant fool. Thats ok. Like i said, im burying the
| idea. But its obvious enough that someone else will
| discover it soon enough.
| wild_egg wrote:
| They're a dead end for whatever their definition of "AGI" is,
| but still incredibly useful in many areas and not a "dead end"
| economically.
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Well, except for that needing a 40 year bond for a 3 year
| technology cycle thing.
| hoherd wrote:
| "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his
| salary depends upon his not understanding it" and "never argue
| with a man whose job depends on not being convinced" in full
| effect.
| red75prime wrote:
| > Many big names in the industry have long advocated for the
| idea that LLM-s are a fundamental dead end.
|
| There should be papers on fundamental limitations of LLMs then.
| Any pointers? "A single forward LLM pass has TC0 circuit
| complexity" isn't exactly it. Modern LLMs use CoT. Anything
| that uses Godel's incompleteness theorems proves too much (We
| don't know whether the brain is capable of hypercomputations.
| And, most likely, it isn't capable of that).
| jimbokun wrote:
| "Fundamental dead end" strikes me as hyperbolic. Clearly they
| could be an import part of an "AGI" system, even if they're not
| sufficient for building an AGI in and of themselves?
| tim333 wrote:
| I figure it's more like steam engines and flight. While steam
| engines were not suitable for aircraft, experience building
| them could carry over to internal combustion engines. I imagine
| something like that with LLMs and AGI.
| jamesoofou wrote:
| How can u look at progress in LLMs and think "this is mirage"
| NamlchakKhandro wrote:
| Because the depth of concept is so deep, and if you're just
| beginning then it's going to take a while for that statement
| to illuminate how obvious it is.
|
| For those who've been sniffing this since early 2010, it's so
| blindly obvious they've already dropped llms on the floor and
| moved onto deeper alternative research.
|
| For the rest of us, we're still catching coke bottles from
| the sky and building places of worship around them
| graphememes wrote:
| Okay, so come up with an alternative, it's math, you can also
| write algorithms.
| Filligree wrote:
| I can't test them, though.
| gizajob wrote:
| Elon thinking Demis is the evil supervillain is hilariously
| backward and a mirror image of the reality.
| captainbland wrote:
| "From my point of view the Jedi are evil!" comes to mind.
| Cthulhu_ wrote:
| That one struck me as... weird people on both ends. But this is
| Musk, who is deep into the Roko's Basilisk idea [0] (in fact,
| supposedly he and Grimes bonded over that) where AGI is
| inevitable, AGI will dominate like the Matrix and Skynet, and
| anyone that didn't work hard to make AGI a reality will be yote
| in the Torment Nexus.
|
| That is, if you don't build the Torment Nexus from the classic
| sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus, someone else will
| and you'll be punished for not building it.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
| danaris wrote:
| ...or, depending on your particular version of Roko's
| Basilisk (in particular, versions that assume AGI will not be
| achieved in "your" lifetime), it will punish not you,
| yourself, but a myriad of _simulations_ of you.
|
| Won't someone think of the poor simulations??
| jimbokun wrote:
| It's never been explained to me why a god like AI would care
| one way or another whether people tried to bring it into
| being or not. I mean the AGI exists now, hurting the people
| that didn't work hard enough to bring it into existence won't
| benefit the AGI in any way.
| tialaramex wrote:
| God-like AI feels like we're really overestimating how
| tough the problem "Destroy humans" would be and so we've
| imagined this very impressive reason it could happen when
| actually we're fragile and might more or less blow away by
| mistake.
|
| It seems we're much more likely to accidentally build
| something dumb that kills us via an unanticipated side
| effect. Like actual Weaboo but for society not just one
| business. AI helps Coca-Cola develop a new beverage that
| initially seems very popular and cheap so it's quickly the
| world's top selling drink - and then we realise, too late,
| that it's actually extremely addictive and withdrawal
| induces violent rage. Oh dear. That sort of thing.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Hence why I like using the paperclip maximizer as an
| example. It's not out to get you, you getting got is just
| an unintentional side effect. Kind of like global
| warming. Nobody wants the earth to burn up, they just
| want to give up transportation/heating/whatever else a
| lot less.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| Why not both.
| ArcHound wrote:
| "As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by
| bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with
| minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment)."
|
| As a businessman, I want to make money. E.g. by automating away
| technologists and their pesky need for excellence and ethics.
|
| On a less cynical note, I am not sure that selling quality is
| sustainable in the long term, because then you'd be selling less
| and earning less. You'd get outcompeted by cheap slop that's
| acceptable by the general population.
| geerlingguy wrote:
| I like the conclusion; like for me, Whisper has radically
| improved CC on my video content. I used to spend a few hours
| translating my scripts into CCs, and tooling was poor.
|
| Now I run it through whisper in a couple minutes, give one quick
| pass to correct a few small hallucinations and misspellings, and
| I'm done.
|
| There are big wins in AI. But those don't pump the bubble once
| they're solved.
|
| And the thing that made Whisper more approachable for me was when
| someone spent the time to refine a great UI for it (MacWhisper).
| sota_pop wrote:
| Not only whispr, so much of the computer vision area is not as
| in vogue. I suspect because the truly monumental solutions
| unlocked are not that accessible to the average person; i.e.
| industrial manufacturing and robotics at scale.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| I think that LLM hype is hiding a lot of very real and
| impactful progress in real world/robot intelligence.
|
| An essay writing machine is cool. A machine that can
| competently control any robot arm, and make it immediately
| useful is a world-changing prospect.
|
| Moving and manipulating objects without explicit human coded
| instructions will absolutely revolutionize so much of our
| world.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's because industrial manufacturing and robotics are
| failing to bring down costs and make people's lives more
| affordable.
|
| That's really the only value those technologies provide, so
| if people aren't seeing costs come down there really is zero
| value coming from those technologies.
| colechristensen wrote:
| I think a lot of AI wins are going to end up local and free
| much like whisper.
|
| Maybe it could be a little bit more accurate, it would be nice
| if it ran a little faster, but ultimately it's 95% complete
| software that can be free forever.
|
| My guess is very many AI tasks are going to end up this way. In
| 5-10 years we're all going to be walking around with laptops
| with 100k cores and 1TB of RAM and an LLM that we talk to and
| it does stuff for us more or less exactly like Star Trek.
| tomwphillips wrote:
| Author here. Indeed - it would be just as fantastical to deny
| there has been no value from deep learning, transformers, etc.
|
| Yesterday I heard Cory Doctorow talk about a bunch of pro bono
| lawyers using LLMs to mine paperwork and help exonerate
| innocent people. Also a big win.
|
| There's good stuff - engineering - that can be done with the
| underlying tech without the hyperscaling.
| jamesoofou wrote:
| What do you think about the shape of AI progress?
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I'm surprised the companies fascinated with AGI don't devote some
| resources to neuroscience - it seems really difficult to develop
| a true artificial intelligence when we don't know much about how
| our own works.
|
| Like it's not even clear if LLMs/Transformers are even
| theoretically capable of AGI, LeCun is famously sceptical of
| this.
|
| I think we still lack decades of basic research before we can
| hope to build an AGI.
| ambicapter wrote:
| Admitting you need to do basic research is admitting you're not
| actually <5 years from total world domination (so give us money
| now).
| friendzis wrote:
| Why should they care as long as selling shares of a company
| selling access to a chatbot is the most profitable move?
| csomar wrote:
| Many of the people in control of the capital are gamblers
| rather than researchers.
| wmf wrote:
| If you want to create artificial human intelligence you need to
| know how the brain works. If you're creating alien intelligence
| the brain doesn't matter.
| simonw wrote:
| Tip for AI skeptics: skip the data center water usage argument.
| At this point I think it harms your credibility - numbers like
| "millions of liters of water annually" (from the linked article)
| sound scary when presented without context, but if you compare
| data centers to farmland or even golf courses they're minuscule.
|
| Other energy usage figures, air pollution, gas turbines, CO2
| emissions etc are fine - but if you complain about water usage I
| think it risks discrediting the rest of your argument.
|
| (Aside from that I agree with most of this piece, the "AGI" thing
| is a huge distraction.)
|
| UPDATE an hour after posting this: I may be making an ass of
| myself here in that I've been arguing in this thread about
| comparisons between data center usage and agricultural usage of
| water, but that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use
| potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or
| for many other industrial purposes.
|
| I still think the way these numbers are usually presented - as
| scary large "gallons of water" figures with no additional context
| to help people understand what that means - is an anti-pattern.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Just because there are worse abuses elsewhere doesn't mean
| datacenters should get a pass.
|
| Golf _and_ datacenters should have to pay for their
| externalities. And if that means both are uneconomical in arid
| parts of the country then that 's better than bankrupting the
| public and the environment.
| simonw wrote:
| From https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/11/03/inside-
| the-dat...
|
| > I asked the farmer if he had noticed any environmental
| effects from living next to the data centers. The impact on
| the water supply, he told me, was negligible. "Honestly, we
| probably use more water than they do," he said. (Training a
| state-of-the-art A.I. requires less water than is used on a
| square mile of farmland in a year.) Power is a different
| story: the farmer said that the local utility was set to hike
| rates for the third time in three years, with the most recent
| proposed hike being in the double digits.
|
| The water issue really is a distraction which harms the
| credibility of people who lean on it. There are plenty of
| credible reasons to criticize data enters, use those instead!
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| A farmer is a valuable perspective but imagine asking a
| lumberjack about the ecological effects of deforestation,
| he might know more about it than an average Joe, but
| there's probably better people to ask for expertise?
|
| > Honestly, we probably use more water than they do
|
| This kind of proves my point, regardless of the actual
| truth in this regard, it's a terrible argument to make:
| availability of water starts to become a huge problem in a
| growing amount of places, and this statement implies the
| water usage of something, that in basic principle doesn't
| need water at all, uses comparable amount of water as
| farming, which strictly relies on water.
| simonw wrote:
| The author of the article followed the quote from the
| farmer with a fact-checked (this is the New Yorker) note
| about water usage for AI training.
| belter wrote:
| > The water issue really is a distraction which harms the
| credibility of people who lean on it
|
| Is that really the case? - "Data Centers and Water
| Consumption" - https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-
| centers-and-water-co...
|
| "...Large data centers can consume up to 5 million gallons
| per day, equivalent to the water use of a town populated by
| 10,000 to 50,000 people..."
|
| "I Was Wrong About Data Center Water Consumption" -
| https://www.construction-physics.com/p/i-was-wrong-about-
| dat...
|
| "...So to wrap up, I misread the Berkeley Report and
| significantly underestimated US data center water
| consumption. If you simply take the Berkeley estimates
| directly, you get around 628 million gallons of water
| consumption per day for data centers, much higher than the
| 66-67 million gallons per day I originally stated..."
| simonw wrote:
| Also from that article:
|
| > U.S. data centers consume 449 million gallons of water
| per day and 163.7 billion gallons annually (as of 2021).
|
| Sounds bad! Now let's compare that to agriculture.
|
| USGS 2015 report:
| https://pubs.usgs.gov/fs/2018/3035/fs20183035.pdf has
| irrigation at 118 billion gallons _per day_ - that 's
| 43,070 billion gallons per year.
|
| 163.7 billion / 43,070 billion * 100 = 0.38 - less than
| half a percentage point.
|
| It's very easy to present water numbers in a way that
| looks bad until you start comparing them thoughtfully.
|
| I think comparing data center water usage to domestic
| water usage by people living in towns is actually quite
| misleading. UPDATE: I may be wrong about this, see
| following comment:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45926469#45927945
| belter wrote:
| I am surprised by your analytical mistake of comparing
| irrigation water with data-center water usage...
|
| They are not equivalent. Data centers primarily consume
| potable water, whereas irrigation uses non-potable or
| agricultural-grade water. Mixing the two leads to
| misleading conclusions on the impact.
| simonw wrote:
| That's a really good point - you're right, comparing data
| center usage to potable water usage by towns _is_ a
| different and more valid comparison than comparing with
| water for irrigation.
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| They made a good point, but keep in mind that they're
| doing a "rules for thee, not for me" sometimes.
|
| The same person who mentioned potable water being an
| important distinction also cited a report on data center
| water consumption that did not make the distinction
| (where the 628M number came from).
| belter wrote:
| The problem is many data centers are in areas where water
| systems are supply constrained... -
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
| wasabi991011 wrote:
| This is not a distinction that your second link (that has
| the 628M number) was making either
|
| > water evaporation from hydroelectric dam reservoirs in
| their water use calculations
| belter wrote:
| The factual soundness of my argument is independent of
| the report quality :-) the report influences
| comprehension, not correctness...
|
| The fact data centers are already having a major impact
| on the public water supply systems is known, by the
| decisions some local governments are forced to do, if you
| care to investigate...
|
| https://spectrum.ieee.org/ai-water-usage
|
| "...in some regions where data centers are concentrated--
| and especially in regions already facing shortages--the
| strain on local water systems can be significant.
| Bloomberg News reports that about two-thirds of U.S. data
| centers built since 2022 are in high water-stress areas.
|
| In Newton County, Georgia, some proposed data centers
| have reportedly requested more water per day than the
| entire county uses daily. Officials there now face tough
| choices: reject new projects, require alternative water-
| efficient cooling systems, invest in costly
| infrastructure upgrades, or risk imposing water rationing
| on residents...."
|
| https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-ai-impacts-data-
| cent...
| abathur wrote:
| Agriculture feeds people, Simon.
|
| It's fair to be critical of how the ag industry uses that
| water, but a significant fraction of that activity is
| effectively essential.
|
| If you're going to minimize people's concern like this,
| at least compare it to discretionary uses we could ~live
| without.
|
| The data's about 20 years old, but for example https://ww
| w.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
| suggests we were using over 2b gallons a day to water
| golf courses.
| simonw wrote:
| I called out golf in my first comment in this thread.
|
| If data center usage meant we didn't have enough water
| for agriculture I would shout that from the rooftops.
| abathur wrote:
| Yep--I'm agreeing that one's a good comparison to
| elaborate on.
|
| Exploring how it stacks up against an essential use
| probably won't persuade people who perceive it as
| wasteful.
| IncreasePosts wrote:
| Agriculture is generally essential but that doesn't mean
| that any specific thing done in the name of agriculture
| is essential.
|
| If Americans cut their meat consumption by 10%, we would
| use a lot less water in agriculture and probably also
| live longer in general
| energy123 wrote:
| Iran's ongoing water crisis is an example. One cause of
| it is unnecessary water-intensive crops that they could
| have imported or done without (just consume substitutes).
|
| It's a common reasoning error to bundle up many
| heterogeneous things into a single label ("agriculture!")
| and then assign value to the label itself.
| derektank wrote:
| The vast majority of water in agriculture goes to satisfy
| our taste buds, not nourish our bodies. Feed crops like
| alalfa consume huge amounts of water in the desert
| southwest but the desert climate makes it a great place
| to grow and people have an insatiable demand for cattle
| products.
|
| We could feed the world with far less water consumption
| if we opted not to eat meat. Instead, we let people make
| purchasing decisions for themselves. I'm not sure why we
| should take a different approach when making decisions
| about compute.
| Faelon wrote:
| Thanks for the sanity!! I wish more people understood
| this
| rao-v wrote:
| I mean it's even simpler. Almonds are entirely non
| essential (many other more water efficient nuts) to the
| food supply and in California consume more water than the
| entire industrial sector, and a bit more than all
| residential usage (~5 million acre-feet of water).
|
| Add a datacenter tax of 3x to water sold to datacenters
| and use it to improve water infrastructure all around.
| Water is absolutely a non-issue medium term, and is only
| a short term issue because we've forgotten how to
| modestly grow infrastructure in response to rapid changes
| in demand.
| throwup238 wrote:
| _> We could feed the world with far less water
| consumption if we opted not to eat meat._
|
| If you look at the data for animals, that's not really
| true. See [1] especially page 22 but the short of it is
| that the vast majority of water used for animals is
| "green water" used for animal feed - that's rainwater
| that isn't captured but goes into the soil. Most of the
| plants used for animal feed don't use irrigation
| agriculture so we'd be saving very little on water
| consumption if we cut out all animal products [2]. Our
| water consumption would even get a lot worse because we'd
| have to replace that protein with tons of irrigated
| farmland and we'd lose the productivity of essentially
| all the pastureland that is too marginal to grow anything
| on (50% of US farmland, 66% globally).
|
| Animal husbandry has been such a successful strategy on a
| planetary scale because it's an efficient use of marginal
| resources no matter how wealthy or industrialized you
| are. Replacing all those calories with plants that people
| want to actually eat is going to take _more_ resources,
| not less, especially when you're talking about turning
| pastureland into productive agricultural land.
|
| [1] https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?ar
| ticle=1...
|
| [2] a lot of feed is also distiller's grains used for
| ethanol first before feeding them to animals, so we'd
| wouldn't even cut out most of that
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| That paper makes the opposite argument than you thought
| it made. Even from a freshwater perspective it's more
| water-efficient to get calories/protein/fat directly from
| crops than from animal products.
|
| Since you like their work, the authors of your paper
| answered that question more generally here https://link.s
| pringer.com/article/10.1007/s10021-011-9517-8 where they
| conclude "The water footprint of any animal product is
| larger than the water footprint of crop products with
| equivalent nutritional value".
|
| You make some often debunked claims, like we'd have to
| plant more crops to feed humans directly if we stopped
| eating meat.
|
| This shouldn't make intuitive sense to you since animals
| eat feed grown on good cropland (98% of the water
| footprint of animal ag) that we could eat directly, and
| we lose 95% of the calories when we route crops through
| animals.
| throwup238 wrote:
| You're confusing my argument. I'm not arguing that meat
| is more efficient than plants; that by itself is
| obviously untrue because of the trophic efficiency loss.
| I'm arguing that meat uses marginal resources that would
| otherwise be useless for growing food. If we eliminate
| meat we'd eliminate a lot of marginally productive
| farmland that is naturally irrigated and have to replace
| it with industrialized irrigation farming that will be
| significantly more expensive _and_ use more water and
| energy. Maybe if we had a global cultural reset with
| industrialized farming, but no one is going to be happy
| replacing their beef and chicken with the corn and barley
| and hay that those lands normally grow, much of it
| inedible to humans.
|
| That paper isn't actually debunking anything that I'm
| saying. If the water foot print per calorie is 20x for
| beef but the feed is grown with 90% of its water from
| rainfall, that's not a 20x bigger footprint in a way that
| practically matters because most of that water is
| unrecoverable anyway. The water that is recoverable just
| makes it through the watershed.
|
| Meat is a way to convert land that cant grow things
| people can or want to eat into things that people will
| eat. That pastureland and marginal cropland growing
| animal feed can't just be converted to grow more
| economically productive crops like fruit and vegetables
| without Herculean engineering effort and tons of water
| and fertilizer. Instead the farming would have to stress
| other fertile ecosystems like the Southwest which would
| make the water problems worse, even if their total
| "footprint" is smaller. The headline that beef uses 20x
| more water per calorie completely ignores where that
| water comes from and how useful it actually is to us.
|
| I don't doubt that we can switch to an all plant diet as
| a species but people vastly underestimate the ecological
| and societal cost to do so.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Ask people which they'd rather have: -no more meat and a
| little better AI -keep their meat and AI doesn't improve
| from where it is today..
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Growing almonds is just as essential as building an AI.
| Eating beef at the rate americans do is not essential.
| Thats where basically all the water usage is going.
| Lerc wrote:
| What counts as data center water consumption here? There
| are many ways to arguably come up with a number.
|
| Does it count water use for cooling only, or does it
| include use for the infrastructure that keeps it running
| (power generation, maintenance, staff use, etc.)
|
| Is this water evaporated? Or moved from A to B and raised
| a few degrees.
| giva wrote:
| This is the real point. Just measuring the amount of
| water involved makes no sense. Taking 100 liters of water
| from a river to cool a plant and dumping them back in a
| river a few degrees warmer is different from taking 100
| liters from a fossil acquifer to evaporatively cool the
| same plant.
| hshdhdhj4444 wrote:
| Humans don't consume much water used by humans. Cows do.
| jonas21 wrote:
| The other reason water usage is a bad thing to focus on is
| that datacenters don't inherently have to use water. It's
| not like servers have a spigot where you pour water in and
| it gets consumed.
|
| Water is used in modern datacenters for evaporative
| cooling, and the reason it's used is to save energy -- it's
| typically around 10% more energy efficient overall than
| normal air conditioning. These datacenters often have a PUE
| of under 1.1, meaning they're over 90% efficient at using
| power for compute, and evaporative cooling is one of the
| reasons they're able to achieve such high efficiency.
|
| If governments wanted to, they could mandate that
| datacenters use air conditioning instead of evaporative
| cooling, and water usage would drop to near zero (just
| enough for the restrooms, watering the plants, etc). But
| nobody would ever seriously suggest doing this because it
| would be using more of a valuable resource (electricity /
| CO2 emissions) to save a small amount of a cheap and
| relatively plentiful resource (water).
| jtr1 wrote:
| I think the point here is that objecting to AI data center
| water use and not to say, alfalfa farming in Arizona, reads
| as reactive rather than principled. But more importantly,
| there are vast, imminent social harms from AI that get
| crowded out by water use discourse. IMO, the environmental
| attack on AI is more a hangover from crypto than a thoughtful
| attempt to evaluate the costs and benefits of this new
| technology.
| danaris wrote:
| But if I say "I object to AI _because_ <list of harms> and
| its water use", why would you assume that I don't also
| object to alfalfa farming in Arizona?
|
| Similarly, if I say "I object to the genocide in Gaza",
| would you assume that I don't also object to the Uyghur
| genocide?
|
| This is nothing but whataboutism.
|
| People are allowed to talk about the bad things AI does
| without adding a 3-page disclaimer explaining that they
| understand all the other bad things happening in the world
| at the same time.
| naasking wrote:
| Because your argument is more persuasive to more people
| if you don't expand your criticism to encompass things
| that are already normalized. Focus on the unique harms
| IMO.
| TheCoelacanth wrote:
| No, that's not the point.
|
| If you take a strong argument and through in an extra
| weak point, that just makes the whole argument less
| persuasive (even if that's not rational, it's how people
| think).
|
| You wouldn't say the "Uyghur genocide is bad because of
| ... also the disposable plastic crap that those slave
| factories produce is terrible for the environment."
|
| Plastic waste is bad but it's on such a different level
| from genocide that it's a terrible argument to make.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Adding a weak argument is a red flag for BS detectors.
| It's what prosecutors do to hoodwink a jury into stacking
| charges over a singular underlying crime.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| > the environmental attack on AI is more a hangover from
| crypto than a thoughtful attempt to evaluate the costs and
| benefits of this new technology
|
| Especially since so many anti-crypto people immediately
| pivoted to anti-AI. That sudden shift in priorities makes
| it hard to take them seriously.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| I didn't pivot - I'm still strongly anti-crypto and
| pretty strongly anti-AI.
| emp17344 wrote:
| The anti-crypto people were correct, though. Why should
| we not push back when we're seeing the same type of
| baseless hype that surrounded crypto being cultivated
| around the AI space?
| jtr1 wrote:
| They were and we should push back and yes, there is a
| mountain of baseless hype. But if you train your fire on
| the wrong thing, you risk not addressing the actual
| problem.
| jtr1 wrote:
| On the flip side, the crypto hype machine pretty
| seamlessly flipped to the AI hype machine, so it makes
| sense the same anti crowd shifted pretty seamlessly.
| Given the practical applications of crypto were minimal
| and the externalities were mostly crime and pollution,
| I'm not at all surprised that many people expect the same
| for AI.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I don't think there's a world where a water use tax is levied
| such that 1) it's enough for datacenters to notice and 2)
| doesn't immediately bankrupt all golf courses and beef
| production, because the water use of datacenters is just _so
| much smaller_.
| bee_rider wrote:
| We definitely shouldn't worry about bankrupting golf
| courses, they are not really useful in any way that
| wouldn't be better served by just having a park or
| wilderness.
|
| Beef, I guess, is a popular type of food. I'm under the
| impression that most of us would be better off eating less
| meat, maybe we could tax water until beef became a special
| occasion meal.
| roywiggins wrote:
| I'm saying that if you taxed water enough for datacenters
| to notice, beef would probably become uneconomical to
| produce at all. Maybe a good idea! But the reason
| datacenters would keep operating and beef production
| wouldn't is that datacenters produce way more utility per
| gallon.
| jandrewrogers wrote:
| A lot of beef is produced in such a way that taxing
| municipal water won't make a material difference. Even
| buying market rate water rights in the high desert, which
| already happens in beef production, is a pretty small
| tariff on the beef.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Taxes can have nuance.
|
| You can easily write a law that looks like this: There is
| now a water usage tax. It applies only to water used for
| data-centers. It does not apply to residential use,
| agricultural use, or any other industrial use.
|
| We do preferential pricing and taxing all the time. My
| home's power rate through the state owned utility is very
| different than if I consumed the exact same amount of
| power, but was an industrial site. I just checked and my
| water rate at home is also different than if I were
| running a datacenter. So in all actuality we already
| discriminate for power and water based on end use. at
| least where I live. Most places I have lived have
| different commercial and residential rates.
|
| In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >In other words, the price of beef can stay the same.
|
| And yet, if you believe the environmentalist argument in
| the first place, the price of beef _should_ go up for the
| damages it causes. Hence why a lot of people think the
| people complaining about AI are wearing an
| environmentalist mask, rather than having an actual care
| about the environment.
|
| Pigouvian taxes are fine, but should be applied across
| all sources of damage.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Yes, if you don't like datacenters, tax datacenters. If
| you want to do it via a tax on the water they use then I
| guess that works.
|
| But the environment doesn't really care whether the water
| is being used by a datacenter or something else. My point
| is just that data centers are actually _more efficient
| users of water_ compared to many less-controversial
| users.
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| If it only applies to beef, fine. If it's ALL
| agriculture...
|
| I can live without another datacenter - I get very little
| utility from "one more" - but I have to eat, generally
| every day..
| iamacyborg wrote:
| > We definitely shouldn't worry about bankrupting golf
| courses, they are not really useful in any way that
| wouldn't be better served by just having a park or
| wilderness.
|
| Might as well get rid of all the lawns and football
| fields while we're at it.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| That's a debate worth having too! And it doesn't block
| this AI debate from continuing nonetheless.
| fwip wrote:
| Water taxes should probably be regional. The price of
| water in the arid Southwest is much higher than toward
| the East coast. You might see both datacenters and beef
| production moving toward states like Tennessee or
| Kentucky.
| foxglacier wrote:
| Of course golf courses are useful as shown by the fact
| that people pay to use them. Perhaps you mean that you
| personally haven't (yet) found them useful, but you know
| that different people want different things. I think
| eating shrimp is disgusting and never eat them but I
| don't want to ban global shrimp production because the
| people it would harm are not me!
| heymijo wrote:
| You're not wrong.
|
| My perspective from someone who wants to understand this new
| AI landscape in good faith. The water issue isn't the show
| stopper it's presented as. It's an externality like you
| discuss.
|
| And in comparison to other water usage, data centers don't
| match the doomsday narrative presented. I know when I see it
| now, I mentally discount or stop reading.
|
| Electricity though seems to be real, at least for the area
| I'm in. I spent some time with ChatGPT last weekend working
| to model an apples:apples comparison and my area has seen a
| +48% increase in electric prices from 2023-2025. I modeled a
| typical 1,000kWh/month usage to see what that looked like in
| dollar terms and it's an extra $30-40/month.
|
| Is it data centers? Partly yes, straight from the utility
| co's mouth: "sharply higher demand projections--driven
| largely by anticipated data center growth"
|
| With FAANG money, that's immaterial. But for those who
| aren't, that's just one more thing that costs more today than
| it did yesterday.
|
| Coming full circle, for me being concerned with AI's actual
| impact on the world, engaging with the facts and
| understanding them within competing narratives is helpful.
| amarcheschi wrote:
| Not only electricity, air pollution around some datacenters
| too
|
| https://www.politico.com/news/2025/05/06/elon-musk-xai-
| memph...
| simonw wrote:
| I'd love to say the air pollution issue get the attention
| that's currently being diverted to the water issue!
| Windchaser wrote:
| > It's an externality like you discuss.
|
| It's not even an externality? They just pay market price
| for water. You can argue the market price is priced badly
| (e.g., maybe prices are set by the state), but that doesn't
| make it an externality. The benefits/costs are still
| accrued by (and internal to) buyer and seller.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| If datacenters are getting electricity and water at a
| rate lower than retail (costs passed on to residents or
| tax payers), and factors like noise and water pollution
| aren't factored in, then yes there are unpriced
| externalities.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| In what way are they not paying for it?
| reedf1 wrote:
| Yes - and the water used is largely non-consumptive.
| binoct wrote:
| Not really. The majority of data center water withdrawal
| (total water input) is consumed ("lost" to evaporation
| etc...) with a minority of it discharged (returned in liquid
| form). I believe it's on the order of 3/4ths consumed, but
| that varies a lot by local climate and cooling technology.
|
| There's lots of promising lower-consumption cooling options,
| but seems like we are not yet seeing that in a large fraction
| of data centers globally.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Farmland, AI data centers, and golf courses do not provide the
| same utility for water used. You are not making an argument
| against the water usage problem, you are only dismissing it.
| simonw wrote:
| Right, I think a data center produces a heck of a lot more
| economic and human value in a year - for a lot more people -
| than the same amount of water used for farming or golf.
| notahacker wrote:
| you can make a strong argument for the greater necessity of
| farming for survival, but not for golf...
| idiotsecant wrote:
| I mean... Food is pretty important ...
| simonw wrote:
| Which is why the comparison in the _amount_ of water
| usage matters.
|
| Data centers in the USA use less than a fraction of a
| percent of the water that's used for agriculture.
|
| I'll start worrying about competition with water for food
| production when that value goes up by a multiple of about
| 1000.
| wongarsu wrote:
| Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even
| oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and
| almonds.
|
| Also a lot less meat in general. A huge part of our
| agriculture is feed to feed our food. We need some meat,
| but the current amount is excessive
| plufz wrote:
| > Corn, potatoes and wheat are important maybe even
| oranges, but we could live with a lot less alfalfa and
| almonds. Both alfalfa and almonds contain a lot of
| nutrients you dont find in large enough amounts (or at
| all) in corn and potatoes though. And alfalfa improves
| the soil but fixating nitrogen. Sure almonds require
| large amounts of water. Maybe alfalfa does as well? And
| of course it depends on if they are grown for human
| consumption or animal.
| roywiggins wrote:
| The water intensity of American food production would be
| substantially less if we gave up on frivolous things like
| beef, which requires water _vastly_ out of proportion to
| its utility. If the water numbers for datacenters seem
| scary then the water use numbers for the average American
| 's beef consumption is apocalyptic.
| gishh wrote:
| I appreciate that you feel this way, it'll never happen.
|
| The US will never give up on eating meat. Full stop.
|
| For every vegan/vegetarian in the US there are probably
| 25 people that feed beef products to their pets on a
| daily basis.
| lynndotpy wrote:
| While I agree, the "meat is not sustainable" argument is
| literal, and evidenced in beef prices rising as beef
| consumption lowers over the past years. Beef is moving
| along the spectrum from having had been a "staple" to
| increasingly being a luxury.
|
| The US never gave up eating lobster either, but many here
| have never had lobster and almost nobody has lobster even
| once a week. It's a luxury which used to be a staple.
| ben_w wrote:
| Beef is not the only meat. Chicken is much less water
| intensive.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| From the animal welfare perspective, there's much more
| suffering involved in producing a pound of chicken than a
| pound of beef.
| ben_w wrote:
| That depends how sentient a chicken is: their brains are
| of similar complexity to the larger of these models,
| counting params as synapses.
|
| Also, while I'm vegetarian going on vegan, welfare
| arguments are obviously not relevant in response to an
| assertation that Americans aren't going to give up meat,
| because if animal welfare was relevant then Americans
| would give up meat.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Whether people would switch off meat on their own is a
| separate issue. If water became scarce enough to start
| moving the price, then you'd absolutely see people eat
| less meat.
|
| But their point does disarm the suggestion that water
| consumption for AI is bad because it's just for fun while
| meat feeds people.
|
| Because when you eat meat, you could have eaten something
| far less resource intensive like tempeh. But you ate meat
| for reasons beyond survival. For most of us, it's because
| we like the taste and we're used to it.
|
| I don't see that as having any stronger of a claim to
| water consumption than the things we use AI for (fun,
| getting work done, writing nix/k8s config) much less a
| claim to many times the amount of water consumption than
| AI data centers.
| Windchaser wrote:
| > I appreciate that you feel this way, it'll never
| happen. The US will never give up on eating meat. Full
| stop.
|
| I don't see any signs that the US is going to give up on
| AI and data centers, either. (The coming AI winter
| notwithstanding)
|
| For what it's worth, I've cut back quite a bit on my beef
| and pork consumption, and now mostly eat chicken. The
| environmental and ethical arguments finally got to me.
| roywiggins wrote:
| Well, yeah. And I'm not vegetarian either. But it's just
| a fact that beef production is a vastly less efficient
| user of water than datacenters.
| Aransentin wrote:
| Growing almonds uses 1.3 trillion gallons of water annually
| in California alone.
|
| This is more than 4 times more than all data centers in the
| US combined, counting both cooling and the water used for
| generating their electricity.
|
| What has more utility: Californian almonds, or all IT
| infrastructure in the US times 4?
| fmbb wrote:
| Depends on what the datacenters are used for.
|
| AI has no utility.
|
| Almonds make marzipan.
| embedding-shape wrote:
| Well, I don't like marzipan, so both are useless? Or
| maybe different people find uses/utility from different
| things, what is trash for one person can be life saving
| for another, or just "better than not having it" (like
| you and Marzipan it seems).
| simonw wrote:
| "AI has no utility" is a pretty wild claim to make in the
| tail end of 2025.
| infecto wrote:
| Still surprised to see so many take this as such a hot
| claim. Is there hype, absolutely, is there value being
| driven also absolutely.
| stavros wrote:
| Whenever I see someone say AI has no utility, I'm happy
| that I don't have to waste time in an argument against
| someone out of touch with reality.
| Aransentin wrote:
| I'm more unhappy than happy, as there are plenty of
| points about the very real bad side of AI that are hurt
| by such delusional and/or disingenuous arguments.
|
| That is, the topic is not one where I have already picked
| a side that I'd like to win by any means necessary. It's
| one where I think there are legitimate tradeoffs, and I
| want the strongest arguments on both sides to be heard so
| we get the best possible policies in the end.
| stavros wrote:
| I agree, but you can't win against religious people.
| Better spend your time talking to the rest of us.
|
| The article made a really interesting and coherent
| argument, for example. That's the kind of discourse
| around the topic I'd like to see.
| emp17344 wrote:
| If AI is so useful, we should have a ton of data showing
| an increase in productivity across many fields. GDP
| should be skyrocketing. We haven't seen any of this, and
| every time a study is conducted, it's determined that AI
| is modestly useful at best.
| stavros wrote:
| I don't need data to know that I use it every day and
| offload lots of tasks to it.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| It's like the smooth brains who still post "lol 6
| fingers"
| roywiggins wrote:
| ok in that case you don't need to pick on water in
| particular, if it has no utility at all then _literally
| any resource use is too much_ , so why bother insisting
| that water in particular is a problem? It's pretty energy
| intensive, eg.
| oompydoompy74 wrote:
| AI has way more utility than you are claiming and less
| utility than Sam Altman and the market would like us to
| believe. It's okay to have a nuanced take.
| HumanOstrich wrote:
| AI has no utility _for you_ because you live in this
| bubble where you are so rabidly against it you will never
| allow yourself to acknowledge it has non-zero utility.
| Der_Einzige wrote:
| Activated almonds create funko pops. I'd still take the
| data centers over the funko pops buying basedboys that
| almonds causes.
| ben_w wrote:
| Marzipan is fun, but useful?
|
| AI is at least as useful as marzipan.
| LPisGood wrote:
| What does it mean to "use" water? In agriculture and in
| data centers my understanding is that water will go back to
| the sky and then rain down again. It's not gone, so at most
| we're losing the energy cost to process that water.
| kachapopopow wrote:
| and water from datacenters goes where...? just
| disappears?
| LPisGood wrote:
| No it's largely the same situation I think. I was drawing
| a distinction between agricultural use and maybe some
| more heavy industrial uses while the water is polluted or
| otherwise rendered permanently unfit for other uses.
| tux3 wrote:
| So with the water used in datacenters. It's just a
| cooling loop, the output is hot water.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| The problem is that you take the water from the ground,
| and you let it evaporate, and then it returns to... Well
| to various places, including the ground, but the deeper
| you take the water from (drinking water can't be taken
| from the surface, and for technological reasons drinking
| water is used too) the more time it takes to replenish
| the aquifer - up to thousands of years!
|
| Of course surface water availability can also be a
| serious problem.
| kajika91 wrote:
| I'll take the almonds any day.
| derektank wrote:
| Other people might have other preferences. Maybe we could
| have a price system where people can express their
| preferences by paying for things with money, providing
| more money to the product which is in greater demand?
| hn_acc1 wrote:
| Sure.. Except some people / companies have so much more
| money, they can demand impractical things and pay above-
| market rates for them, causing all others to scramble to
| live day-to-day with the distorted market.
|
| Tried buying a GPU lately?
| LevGoldstein wrote:
| People have been sounding the alarm about excessive water
| diverted to almond farming for many years though, so that
| doesn't really help the counter-argument.
|
| Example article from a decade ago:
| https://www.motherjones.com/environment/2015/01/almonds-
| nuts...
| lynndotpy wrote:
| Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for
| their high water use. Notably, we're not betting an entire
| economy and pouring increasing resources into almond
| production, either. Your example would be even more extreme
| if you chose crops like the corn used to feed cattle.
| Feeding cows alone requires 21.2 trillion gallons per year
| in the US.
|
| The people advocating for sustainable usage of natural
| resources have already been comparing the utility of
| different types of agriculture for years.
|
| Comparatively, tofu is efficient to produce in terms of
| land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use, and can
| be made shelf-stable.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >Notably, we're not betting an entire economy and pouring
| increasing resources into almond production,
|
| Excellent, that means we can save massive amounts of
| water by stopping almond production in the western US.
| AgentME wrote:
| >Almonds are pretty cherry picked here as notorious for
| their high water use.
|
| If water use was such a dire issue that we needed to
| start cutting down on high uses of it, then we should
| absolutely cherry pick the high usages of it and start
| there. (Or we should just apply a pigouvian tax across
| all water use, which will naturally affect the biggest
| consumers of it.)
| didibus wrote:
| Aren't Californian almonds like 80% of the world's
| production?
|
| Is the US AI data-centers producing 80% of the world's IT ?
|
| I ask legitimately, I think that would already make it more
| apples to apples.
|
| Also if you ask me personally, I'd rather have almonds than
| cloud AI compute. Imagine a future 100 years from now, we
| killed the almonds, never to be enjoyed ever again by
| future generations... Or people don't have cloud AI
| compute. It's personal, but I'd be more sad that I'd never
| get to experience the taste of an almond and all the
| cuisine that comes with it.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| That is correct, AI data centers deliver far more utility per
| unit of water than farm/golf land.
| fodkodrasz wrote:
| Water usage largely depends on the context, if the water
| source is sustainable, and if it is freshwater.
|
| Of course water used up will eventually evaporate, and
| produce rainfall in the water cycle, but unfortunately at
| many places "fossil" water is used up, or more water used in
| an area then the watershed can sustainably support.
|
| This is a constant source of miscommunication about water
| usage, and that of agriculture also. It is very different to
| talk about the water needs to raise a cow in eg. Colorado and
| in Scotish highlands, but this is usually removed from the
| picture.
|
| The same context should be considered for datacenters.
| simianwords wrote:
| who are you to determine the utility? we have the market for
| it and it has spoken.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| They are making an _anti-disruption_ argument.
|
| I think it's bad though to be against growth, for reasons
| I've described in another comment.
| dlord wrote:
| I think the water usage argument can be pertinent depending on
| the context.
|
| https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2ngz7ep1eo
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/nov/10/data-cent...
|
| https://www.reuters.com/article/technology/feature-in-latin-...
| simonw wrote:
| That BBC story is a great example of what I'm talking about
| here:
|
| > A small data centre using this type of cooling can use
| around 25.5 million litres of water per year. [...]
|
| > For the fiscal year 2025, [Microsoft's] Queretaro sites
| used 40 million litres of water, it added.
|
| > That's still a lot of water. And if you look at overall
| consumption at the biggest data centre owners then the
| numbers are huge.
|
| That's not credible reporting because it makes no effort at
| all to help the reader understand the magnitude of those
| figures.
|
| "40 million litres of water" is NOT "a lot of water". As far
| as I can tell that's about the same annual water usage as a
| 24 acre soybean field.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| It's a lot of water for AI waifus and videos of Trump
| shitbombing people who dare oppose him.
| lukeschlather wrote:
| It's not a lot of water for AI weather modeling to ensure
| the soybean crops throughout the country are adequately
| watered and maximize yield.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| Yes, a 24 acre soybean field uses a lot of water.
| simonw wrote:
| And an average US soybean farm has 312 acres (13x larger
| than 24 acres):
| http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/soybeans-and-oil-
| crops/...
|
| Which means that in 2025 Microsoft's Queretaro sites used
| 1/13th of a typical US soybean farm's annual amount of
| water.
| dlord wrote:
| I agree that those numbers can seem huge without proper
| context.
|
| For me, that BBC story, and the others, illustrates a
| trend; tech giants installing themselves in ressource-
| strained areas, while promoting their development as
| drivers of economic growth.
| jordanb wrote:
| Water can range from serious concern to NBD depending on where
| the data center is located, where the water is coming from, and
| the specific details of how the data center's cooling systems
| are built.
|
| To say that it's never an issue is disingenuous.
|
| Additionally one could image a data center built in a place
| with a surplus of generating capacity. But in most cases, it
| has a big impact on the local grid or a big impact on air
| quality if they bring in a bunch of gas turbines.
| fny wrote:
| I'm personally excited for when the AGI-nauts start trotting
| out figures like...
|
| > An H100 on low-carbon grid is only about 1-2% of one US
| person's total daily footprint!
|
| The real culprit is humans after all.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Humans have been measuring between human only vs augmented
| labor for literal centuries.
|
| Frederick Taylor literally invented the process you describe
| in his "principles of scientific management"
|
| This is the entire focus of the Toyota automation model.
|
| The consistent empirical pattern is:
|
| Machine-only systems outperform humans on narrow,
| formalizable tasks.
|
| Human-machine hybrid systems outperform both on robustness,
| yieldjng higher success probability
|
| Good enough?
| fny wrote:
| I was making a joke.
| dimitrios1 wrote:
| > sound scary when presented without context
|
| It's not about it being scary, its about it being a gigantic,
| stupid waste of water, and for what? So that lazy executives
| and managers can generate their shitty emails they used to have
| their comms person write for them, so that students can cheat
| on their homework, or so degens can generate a video of MLK
| dancing to rap? Because thats the majority of the common usage
| at this point and creating the demand for all these
| datacenters. If it was just for us devs and researchers, you
| wouldn't need this many.
| simonw wrote:
| Whether it's a "gigantic" waste of water depends on what
| those figures mean. It's very important to understand if 25
| million liters of water per year is a gigantic number or not.
| jstanley wrote:
| For comparison it's about 10 olympic-sized swimming pools
| worth of water, doesn't seem very significant to me. Unless
| you're going to tell people they're not allowed swimming
| pools any more because swimming doesn't produce enough
| utility?
|
| And at any rate, water doesn't get used up! It evaporates
| and returns to the sky to rain down again somewhere else,
| it's the most renewable resource in the entire world.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| If only millions of people suffering from lack of water
| knew this.
| danielbln wrote:
| Would we be sending that water to those millions of
| people instead?
| jjk166 wrote:
| If you redistributed this water to a million people
| suffering from lack of water, they'ed get about 2 shot
| glasses worth per day.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| And also, none of those current use cases are a real benefit
| to society, outside of maybe research cases.
|
| The only benefit is to the already wealthy owner class that
| is itching to not have to pay for employees anymore because
| it impacts their bottom line (payroll is typically the
| largest expense).
|
| It's not like we are making robots to automate agriculture
| and manufacturing to move toward a post scarcity, moneyless
| society, which would have real benefits. No, instead we have
| AI companies hyping up a product whose purpose (according to
| them) is so that already wealthy people can hoard more wealth
| and not have to pay for employees. It's promising to take
| away a large portion of the only high-paying jobs we have
| left for the average person without an advanced degree.
|
| Me being able to write software a little faster, without
| hiring a junior, is a net negative to society rather than a
| benefit.
| simonw wrote:
| You appear to be arguing against using technology to boost
| human efficiency on a forum full of software engineers
| who've dedicated their careers to building software that
| makes humans more efficient.
|
| If we aren't doing that then why are we building software?
| thewebguyd wrote:
| Because the stated goal of generative AI is not to make
| an individual more efficient, it's to replace that
| individual all together and completely eliminate the
| bottom rungs of the professional career ladder.
|
| Historically software that made humans more efficient
| resulted in empowerment for the individual, and also
| created a need for new skilled roles. Efficiency gains
| were reinvested into the labor market. More people could
| enter into higher paying work.
|
| With generative AI, if these companies achieve their
| stated goals, what happens to the wealth generated by the
| efficiency?
|
| If we automate agriculture and manufacturing, the gain is
| distributed as post-scarciaty wealth to everyone.
|
| If we automate the last few remaining white-collar jobs
| that pay a living wage, the gain is captured entirely by
| the capital owners & investors via elimination of
| payroll, while society only loses one of its last high-
| paying ladders for upward mobility.
|
| Nobody lost their career because we built a faster
| operating system or a better compiler. With generative
| AI's stated goals, any efficiency gains are exclusively
| for those at the very top, while everyone else gets
| screwed.
|
| Now, I'll concede and say, that's not the AI companies'
| fault. I'm not saying we shouldn't magically stop
| developing this technology, but we absolutely need our
| governments to start thinking about the ramifications it
| can have and start seriously considering things like UBI
| to be prepared for when the bottom falls out of the labor
| market.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks, that's a well argued comment.
|
| I'm not a fan of of the "replace workers with AI" thing
| myself - I'm much more excited about AI as augmentation
| for existing workers so they can take on more challenging
| tasks.
| knollimar wrote:
| Does the future productivity growth that would have been
| gained later (due to more junior engineers not entering
| the field) outweigh the AI gains?
|
| If it's just the little productivity boost now, I think
| it's a net negative if hiring trends continue.
|
| I think it's a discussion to be had but talent pool is a
| tragedy of the commons situation.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Its not gigantic and its not a waste. Brainrot creates
| massive economic value that can be used to pay people for
| products you are more happy to consume.
| BeFlatXIII wrote:
| Seems the problem is the revealed preference of the normies,
| rather than the technology itself.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Fine, fine: get rid of golf courses too.
|
| As for food production; that might be important? IDK, I am not
| a silicon "intelligence" so what do I know? Also, I have to
| "eat". Wouldn't it be a wonderful world if we can just replace
| ourselves, so that agriculture is unnecessary, and we can
| devote all that water to AGI.
|
| TIL that the true arc of humanity is to replace itself!
| simonw wrote:
| See comment here:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927268
|
| Given the difference in water usage, more data centers does
| not mean less water for agriculture in any meaningful way.
|
| If you genuinely want to save water you should celebrate any
| time an acre of farm land is converted into an acre of data
| center - all the more water for the other farms!
| buellerbueller wrote:
| the value of datacenters is dubious. the value of
| agriculture, less so.
| simonw wrote:
| Once again, the key thing here is to ask how MUCH value
| we get per liter of water used.
|
| If data centers and farms used the same amount of water
| we should absolutely be talking about their comparative
| value to society, and farms would win.
|
| Farms use thousands of times more water than data
| centers.
| danaris wrote:
| Yes, it _is_ worthwhile to ask how much value we get.
|
| And a whole bunch of us are saying we don't see the value
| in all these datacenters being built and run at full
| power to do training and inference 24/7, but you just
| keep ignoring or dismissing that.
|
| It is absolutely possible that generative AI provides
| _some_ value. That is not the same thing as saying that
| it provides _enough_ value to justify all of the
| resources being expended on it.
|
| The fact that the amount of water it uses is a fraction
| of what is used by agriculture--which is both one of
| _the_ most important uses humans can put water to, as
| well as, AIUI, by far the single largest use of water in
| the world--is not a strong argument that its water usage
| should be ignored.
| simianwords wrote:
| it is also a fraction of golf courses which you again
| ignore. this is just typical "don't do anything!!" ism.
| there's no argument here.. even if data centres used
| .00001 millilitre of water you would say the same thing.
| davidcbc wrote:
| Complaining about someone else using an "ism" during a
| literal "whataboutism" is rich
| danaris wrote:
| Oh, I think golf courses shouldn't exist. They're awful
| in a number of ways. You want to play golf? VR or
| minigolf.
|
| But (as I pointed out elsewhere in this discussion [0])
| why should I have to mention _everything_ that uses water
| in a way I think is detrimental in order to be allowed to
| talk about why I think _this_ thing uses water in a way
| that is detrimental?
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45927558
| simianwords wrote:
| if you are at the point where you have to suggest golf
| courses shouldn't exist then sorry we are completely on
| different page here.
|
| your logic will extend to just doing nothing at all
| because it will take resources from other things that you
| value.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| Why would the logic extend there? If golf courses really
| do use a lot of water, energy, etc, and they largely
| benefit a small subset of people, it doesn't make a ton
| of sense for them to exist.
|
| Of course making the world a better place for everyone is
| very against western and American exceptionalism and
| freedom.
| keeda wrote:
| That's a fair point. For people already finding great
| utility in GenAI it seems like a foregone conclusion, but
| for others it can be understandably frustrating that
| people take it as an article of faith that "AI is worth
| it."
|
| Disclosure, I'm very much in the former camp, but I try
| to ground myself with broader empirical evidence. I've
| found an increasing amount of empirical evidence that
| GenAI is providing value more than commensurate with its
| costs.
|
| Largely the studies I've looked at focus on productivity
| boosts, I guess because that is very easy to tie to
| economic impact. This recent thread has some relevant
| sources and _extremely_ rough numbers, but the outcome
| seems to be that for a 1% increase in datacenter usage we
| may have gotten a 1.2% boost in national productivity:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45794907
|
| Now, this absolutely _not_ a rigorous analysis, but could
| be a good starting point for how to think about these
| tradeoffs.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| Once again, you are ignoring my (implied) argument:
|
| Humans NEED food, the output of agriculture. Humans do
| not NEED any of LLMs' outputs.
|
| Once everyone is fed, then we can talk about water usage
| for LLMs.
| rcxdude wrote:
| Farms already produce more than enough food to feed
| everyone (and, indeed, the excess is a feature because
| food security is really important). The reason not
| everyone is fed is not due to needing to divide water
| resources between farms and other uses.
| simonw wrote:
| We produce enough food for everyone already, and then
| waste a huge amount of it. Our food problem isn't about
| producing more, it's about distributing what we have.
| Kiro wrote:
| Going only by the effective need of humans is a bad
| argument. A lot of farmers wouldn't survive without
| subsidies and are not vital to our food supply.
| simianwords wrote:
| fine so do the same performative activism for
|
| 1. netflix
|
| 2. gmail
|
| 3. hackernews
|
| 4. discord
|
| 5. gaming
| nasmorn wrote:
| Stop eating beef. With the water saved we can grow enough
| food for any realistic human population. Ok we solved
| this one. Or do humans NEED burgers as well? We can
| already feed all people, any starvation is strictly a
| political problem not a food existing on the planet
| problem
| 9rx wrote:
| I make use of AI in my farming operation. Now what?
| bigbuppo wrote:
| Yeah, but the AI you use in your farming operation is
| running on that tiny little box behind the buddy seat.
| 9rx wrote:
| That too, but I, more specifically, meant LLMs operating
| in someone else's datacenter here.
| Etherlord87 wrote:
| According to this logic the ideal situation is when there
| are no farms anymore because then each (out of zero) farm
| gets maximum water.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Eventually people stop building more data centers as food
| becomes scarce and expensive, and farms become the hot
| new thing for the stock market, cereal entrepreneurs
| become the new celebrities and so on. Elon Husk, cereal
| magnate.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > but if you compare data centers to farmland or even golf
| courses they're minuscule.
|
| People are critical of farmland and golf courses, too. But
| Farmland at least has more benefit for society, so they are
| more vocal on how it's used.
| randallsquared wrote:
| The problem is more one of scale: a million liters of water
| is less than half of a single Olympic-sized swimming pool. A
| single acre of alfalfa typically requires 4.9 - 7.6 million
| liters a year for irrigation. Also, it's pretty easy to
| recycle the data center water, since it just has to cool and
| be sent back, but the irrigation water is lost to
| transpiration and the recycling-by-weather process.
|
| So, even if there's no recycling, a data center that is said
| to consume "millions" rather than tens or hundreds of
| millions is probably using less than 5 acres of alfalfa in
| consumption, and in absolute terms, this requires only a
| swimming-pool or two of water per years. It's trivial.
| slightwinder wrote:
| > The problem is more one of scale:
|
| I think the source is the bigger problem. If they take the
| water from sources which are already scarce, the impact
| will be harsh. There probably wouldn't be any complaints if
| they would use sewerage or saltwater from the ocean.
|
| > Also, it's pretty easy to recycle the data center water,
| since it just has to cool
|
| Cooling and returning the water is not always that simple.
| I don't know specifically about datacentres, but I know
| about wasting clean water in other areas, cooling in power
| plants, industry, etc. and there it can have a significant
| impact on the cycle. At the end it's a resource which is
| used at least temporary, which has impact on the whole
| system.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > If they take the water from sources which are already
| scarce, the impact will be harsh.
|
| Surprised I had to scroll down this far to see this
| mentioned.
|
| The water use argument is highly local and depends on
| _where_ we are building these data centers. Are you
| building in the great lakes region with plenty of fresh
| water and no water scarcity issues (yet)? Ok fine.
|
| But we aren't building there. We're building in Arizona,
| Nevada, Nebraska, Iowa putting further stress in an area
| that water scarcity is already an issue, or soon going to
| become one due to long term drought conditions. Or Texas,
| which already has problems with their power grid.
|
| We're building in these locations because they're cheap.
| If we're going do to this, we need to not let the bottom
| line be the sole driving decision of data center
| locations. If it's not profitable to build elsewhere,
| don't build it until you've figured out how to make it
| efficient enough to where it is profitable.
| skinnymuch wrote:
| > don't build it until you've figured out how to make it
| efficient enough to where it is profitable.
|
| This goes against American freedom
| the__alchemist wrote:
| I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are
| classifying themselves as "AI skeptics". Many people are
| treating this in terms of tribal conflict and identity
| politics. On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the
| politics, and discuss things on their technical merits. If we
| do talk about it as a debate, we can do it when with open
| minds, and intellectual honesty.
|
| I think much of this may be a reaction to the hype promoted by
| tech CEOs and media outlets. People are seeing through their
| lies and exaggerations, and taking positions like "AI/LLMs have
| no values or uses", then using every argument they hear as a
| reason why it is _bad_ in a broad sense. For example: Energy
| and water concerns. That 's my best guess about the concern
| you're braced against.
| techblueberry wrote:
| I mean, it is intellectually honest to point out that the AI
| debate at the point is much more a religious or political
| than strictly technical really. Especially the way tech CEOs
| hype this as the end of everything.
| HardCodedBias wrote:
| It seems like there is a very strong correlation between
| identity politics and "AI skepticism."
|
| I have no idea why.
|
| I don't think that the correlation is 1, but it seems weirdly
| high.
| pimeys wrote:
| Yep. Same for the other direction: there is a very strong
| correlation between identity politics and praising AI on
| Twitter.
|
| Then there's us who are mildly disappointed on the agents
| and how they don't live their promise, and the tech CEOs
| destroying the economy and our savings. Still using the
| agents for things that work better, but being burned out
| for spending days of our time fixing the issues the they
| created to our code.
| tech_ken wrote:
| The adoption and use of technology frequently (even
| typically) has a political axis, it's kind of just this
| weird world of consumer tech/personal computers that's
| nominally "apolitical" because it's instead aligned to the
| axis of taste/self-identity so it'll generate more economic
| activity.
| wmf wrote:
| AI hating is part of the omnicause because it overlaps with
| art ho socialism, degrowth environmentalism, and general
| tech skepticism/ludditism.
| Flavius wrote:
| Expecting a purely technical discussion is unrealistic
| because many people have significant vested interests. This
| includes not only those with financial stakes in AI stocks
| but also a large number of professionals in roles that could
| be transformed or replaced by this technology. For these
| groups, the discussion is inherently political, not just
| technical.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| I don't really mind if people advocate for their value
| judgements, but the total disregard for good faith
| arguments and facts is really out of control. The number of
| people who care at all about finding the best position
| through debate and are willing to adjust their position is
| really shockingly small across almost every issue.
| Flavius wrote:
| Totally agree. It seems like a symptom of a larger issue:
| people are becoming increasingly selfish and entrenched
| in their own bubbles. It's hard to see a path back to
| sanity from here.
| lukan wrote:
| Well, I share your pain .. but was it ever really better
| in reality?
|
| Unfortunately it is not like human society in history had
| truth as the highest virtue.
| keeganpoppen wrote:
| yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes it was closer to
| the top, but societies in which people are willing to die
| for abstract ideas tend to be one... where the value of
| life isn't quite as high as it is nowadays (ie no matter
| how much my inner nerd has a love and fascination for
| that time period, no way i'm pressing the button on any
| one-way time machines...).
| pixl97 wrote:
| >yeah maybe around the time of Archimedes
|
| I mean, Archimedes stands out because he searched for the
| truth and documented it. I'm sure most people on the
| planet at that time would have burned you for being a
| witch, or whatever fabled creature was in vogue at the
| time.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Archimedes, who according to legend was killed in the
| middle of searching for truth?
| medvezhenok wrote:
| Human societies? No.
|
| Subcultures? Some are at least trying to (i.e.
| rationalists), though imperfectly and with side-effects.
| ineedasername wrote:
| This depends on the particular group of rationalists. An
| unfortunately outsized and vocal group with strong
| overlap in the tech community has gone to notions of
| quasi mathematical reasoning distorting things like EV
| ("expected value"). Many have stretched "reason" way past
| the breaking point to articles of faith but with a far
| more pernicious affect than traditional points of
| religious dogma that are at least more easily
| identifiable as "faith" due to their religious trappings.
|
| Edit: See Roko's Basilisk as an example. wherein
| something like variation on Christian hell is
| independently reinvented for those not donating enough to
| bring about the coming superhuman AGI, who will therefore
| punish you- or the closest simulation it can spin up in
| VR if you're long gone- for all eternity. The infinite
| negative EV far outweighing any positive EV of doing more
| than subsist in poverty. Even managed to work in that it
| could be a reluctant, but otherwise benevolent super AI
| such that, while benevolent, it wanted to exist, and to
| maximize its chances it bound itself to a promise in the
| future to do these things as an incentive for people to
| get it to exist.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| Only among the people who are yelling, perhaps? I find
| the majority of people I talk with have open minds and
| acknowledge the opinions of others without accepting them
| as fact.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| > a large number of professionals in roles that could be
| transformed or replaced by this technology.
|
| Right, "It is difficult get a man to understand something
| when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
|
| I see this sort of irrationality around AI at my workplace,
| with the owners constantly droning on about "we must use AI
| everywhere." They are completely and irrationally paranoid
| that the business will fail or get outpaced by a competitor
| if we are not "using AI." Keep in mind this is a small 300
| employee, non-tech company with no real local competitors.
|
| Asking for clarification or what they mean by "use AI" they
| have no answers, just "other companies are going to use AI,
| and we need to use AI or we will fall behind."
|
| There's no strategy or technical merit here, no pre-defined
| use case people have in mind. Purely driven by hype. We
| _do_ in fact use AI. I do, the office workers use it daily,
| but the reality is it has had no outward /visible effect on
| profitability, so it doesn't show up on the P&L at the end
| of the quarter except as an expense, and so the hype and
| mandate continues. The only thing that matters is
| _appearing_ to "use AI" until the magic box makes the line
| go up.
| jcgrillo wrote:
| I've heard the same breathless parroting of the marketing
| hype at large O(thousands ppl) cloud tech companies. A
| quote from leadership:
|
| _> This is existential. If we aren 't early adopters of
| AI tools we will be left behind and will never catch up._
|
| This company is dominant in the space they operate in.
| The magnitude of the delusion is profound. Ironically,
| this crap is actually distracting and affects quality, so
| it could affect competitiveness--just not how they hope.
| lkey wrote:
| | Drop the politics
|
| Politics is the set of activities that are associated with
| making decisions in groups, or other forms of power relations
| among individuals, such as _the distribution of status or
| resources_.
|
| Most municipalities literally do not have enough spare power
| to service this 1.4 trillion dollar capital rollout as
| planned on paper. Even if they did, the concurrent inflation
| of energy costs is about as political as a topic can get.
|
| Economic uncertainty (firings, wage depression) brought on by
| the promises of AI is about as political as it gets. There's
| no 'pure world' of 'engineering only' concerns when the
| primary goals of many of these billionaires is leverage this
| hype, real and imagined, into reshaping the global economy in
| their preferred form.
|
| The only people that get to be 'apolitical' are those that
| have already benefitted the most from the status quo. It's a
| privilege.
| eucyclos wrote:
| There are politics and there are Politics, and I don't
| think the two of you are using the same definition. 'Making
| decisions in groups' does not require 'oversimplifying
| issues for the sake of tribal cohesion or loyalty'. It is a
| distressingly common occurrence that complex problems are
| oversimplified because political effectiveness requires
| appealing to a broader audience.
|
| We'd all be better off if more people withheld judgement
| while actually engaging with the nuances of a political
| topic instead of pushing for their team. The capacity to do
| that may be a privilege but it's a privilege worth earning
| and celebrating.
| grokgrok wrote:
| The negatively coded, tribal/political speech can be
| referred to as 'Polemic' which stems from 'warlike'
| expression.
| dontlaugh wrote:
| And polemic is an entirely legitimate form of political
| action.
|
| Would you rather starve or never lie about those that
| would starve you?
| lkey wrote:
| My definition is _the_ definition. You cannot nuance wash
| the material conditions that are increasing tribal
| polarization. Rising inequality and uncertainty create
| fear and discontent, people that offer easy targets for
| that resentment will have more sway.
|
| The rise of populist polemic as the _most effective_
| means for driving public behavior is _also_ downstream
| from 'neutral technical solutions' designed to 'maximize
| engagement (anger) to maximize profit'. This is not
| actually a morally neutral choice and we're all dealing
| with the consequence. Adding AI is fuel for the fire.
| rtkwe wrote:
| Hear hear, It's funny having seen the same issue pop up in
| video game forums/communities. People complaining about
| politics in their video games after decades of completely
| straight faced US military propaganda from games like Call
| of Duty but because they agree with it it wasn't politics.
| To so many people politics begins where they start to
| disagree.
| Terr_ wrote:
| IMO this is one of those areas where we (English speakers,
| likely most other languages as well) collectively suffer
| from ambiguous words.
|
| It might be more accurate to say "drop the partisanship" or
| "drop the in/out-group generalizations", etc.
| magicalist wrote:
| > _I will go meta into what you posted here: That people are
| classifying themselves as "AI skeptics"_
|
| The comment you're replying to is calling _other people_ AI
| skeptics.
|
| Your advice has some fine parts to it (and simonw's comment
| is innocuous in its use of the term), but if we're really
| going meta, you seem to be _engaging_ in the tribal conflict
| you 're decrying by lecturing an imaginary person rather than
| the actual context of what you're responding to.
| pweezy wrote:
| To me, "Tip for AI skeptics" reads as shorthand for "Tip
| for those of you who classify as AI skeptics".
|
| That is why the meta commentary about identity politics
| made complete sense to me. It's simply observing that this
| discussion (like so many others) tends to go this way, and
| suggests a better alternative - without a straw man.
| hamdingers wrote:
| > IMO the move is drop the politics, and discuss things on
| their technical merits.
|
| I'd love this but it's impossible to have this discussion
| with someone who will not touch generative AI tools with a 10
| foot pole.
|
| It's not unlike when religious people condemn a book they
| refuse to read. The merits of the book don't matter, it's
| symbolic opposition to something broader.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| Okay, but a lot of people are calling environmental and
| content theft arguments "political" in an attempt to make
| it sound frivolous.
|
| It's fine if you think every non-technical criticism
| against AI is overblown. I use LLMs, but it's perfectly
| fine to start from a place of whether it's ethical, or even
| a net good, to use these in the first place.
|
| People saying "ignoring all of those arguments, let's just
| look at the tech" are, generously, either naive or
| shilling. Why would we only revisit these very important
| topics, which are the heart of how the tech would alter our
| society, after it's been fully embraced?
| nasmorn wrote:
| The environmental argument is frivolous as long as people
| fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to the
| office. Why is this as special domain?
| zzzeek wrote:
| debating the environmental and public health effects of
| AI negates the possibility of debating those same things
| with respect to cars/trucks ?
| ineedasername wrote:
| Charitably, I think you can read into that a not-
| unreasonable (if unproven) assertion that there are many
| lower hanging fruits on the tree that would do endlessly
| more good for the cause to pick than data centers, and AI
| at least has the arguable potential upside of alleviating
| some of those specific burdens-- better health care and
| less environmental pollution through various improved
| forms of automation. Or at least when addressing the stub
| claim of the sort in the GP comment, you should assume
| these fairly straightforward subclaims pre-emptively and
| respond to this stronger form of the argument. It saves
| time, at least if you're going to seek out a _discussion_
| it does. Plenty of counter claims to them, but it gets
| the conversational ball rolling in a productive direction
| and if the response in turn is less constructive then you
| also know not to bother any more.
| wonnage wrote:
| Driving a massive truck in the city is stupid too and
| most short flights should be replaced with high speed
| rail. And AI wastes a monumental amount of resources.
| camdenreslink wrote:
| I think that form of argument is called "whataboutism".
| Whether flights waste energy or are environmentally
| unfriendly is really a separate issue. Both things can be
| bad.
| tharne wrote:
| > The environmental argument is frivolous as long as
| people fly to Vegas for the weekend or drive a F150 to
| the office. Why is this as special domain?
|
| I keep seeing arguments like this. They sound like a bit
| like a form of nihilsm. Do you really think we shouldn't
| worry about risks to the environment simply because we're
| all hypocrites on that front in one way or another? I get
| the frustration and have been guilty of using this type
| of argument myself in the past, but refusing to discuss a
| problem because the people raising the concern are
| imperfect human beings doesn't seem like a tenable
| position.
| foxglacier wrote:
| I wouldn't ignore those arguments but most of the time,
| they're so poorly formed (eg. using data without logic),
| they aren't really worth listening to. If you believe AI
| provides no value, then any environmental cost is too
| high for you but you can't convey that by trying to
| dramatize how high it is. That's dishonest and I think
| people rightly turn off it.
| diamond559 wrote:
| Right now Open"AI", Oracle and everyone else are burning
| billions of dollars to buy and run these llms, they raise
| the price of energy around them, they provide negative
| economic benefit. It's dishonest of you to pretend that
| isn't the case.
| buu700 wrote:
| Well they're separate issues. Someone could plausibly
| take the position that air travel should be banned for
| environmental reasons, but that has no relevance to the
| utility of air travel. If a group of people were loudly
| proclaiming that planes were not only bad but useless,
| anyone who routinely uses planes would obviously find
| them non-credible.
| Capricorn2481 wrote:
| They're not separate at all, especially if the question
| is "How hard should we push people to use this."
|
| To be clear, there are a lot of people who routinely used
| airplanes who don't post-covid, but insisted that they
| had to. Yeah, I think it's pretty wasteful to fly across
| the country for a 30 minute meeting. Most don't fly at
| all. I don't know what mass-psychosis white collar
| industries were under to think that was necessary.
| buu700 wrote:
| They're 100% separate. "Planes aren't useful" and "planes
| don't work" are completely different sentiments than
| "it's pretty wasteful to fly across the country for a 30
| minute meeting" and "we shouldn't push people hard to use
| air travel".
|
| I know for a fact that planes work, because I've been on
| a plane and observed it lifting me high off the ground
| and rapidly transporting me to a distant location. The
| fact that planes typically emit CO2 doesn't make their
| existence and utility some kind of mass hallucination.
|
| This distinction may sound a bit silly, because I assume
| we all agree that planes literally work. But the point
| I'm making is as it applies to AI. Like many people, I
| know from experience that AI isn't vaporware and is
| extremely useful for many purposes. I'm sure many others
| haven't had the same experience for various reasons, and
| factually report their observations in good faith -- but
| that's different from pushing a narrative which one
| _wishes_ to be true, regardless of how valid the reasons
| for that wish may be.
| diamond559 wrote:
| No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument
| assuming "AI skeptics" are illiterate and/or incapable of
| understanding. You ironically are the one refusing to
| accept the possibility that you are wrong.
| ineedasername wrote:
| Maybe you've used it-- but a very large number of the AI
| skeptic comments I see that actually cite particular
| experiences, even comments in the pages of HN, amount to
| things like, "ChatGPT hallucinated when I asked about the
| local price of product X and if it was in stock anywhere
| around. How can anyone take LLM and AI seriously?"
|
| Or worse, things like "Real science and real engineering
| doesn't rely on tools that behave randomly.".
| hamdingers wrote:
| > No, we've used it, you are creating a strawman argument
|
| There exists a class of "ai-skeptic" who proudly proclaim
| they have never and will never use AI. Examples are not
| hard to find, though I see them more on
| reddit/instagram/bluesky than I do on HN.
|
| If that does not describe you then my comment is not
| about you.
| t43562 wrote:
| The strawman side of it is that one can pick on some
| extremist and "beat them up" publicly as if that settled
| something but it doesn't.
| emp17344 wrote:
| We've all used the tools, and they're... fine. They
| probably will contribute modestly to overall productivity
| in certain fields, but they certainly aren't as
| transformative or magical as the current hype suggests. I'm
| not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn over these
| things.
| hamdingers wrote:
| > I'm not sure why you insist that we continue to fawn
| over these things.
|
| I'm not sure why all the replies under this fairly benign
| comment are full of projections of extreme opinions I do
| not hold and never said I did.
|
| If you want to have a conversation with someone who
| thinks like this you can probably find one in this very
| thread, so why do you respond to me?
| yallpendantools wrote:
| > it's impossible to have this discussion with someone who
| will not touch generative AI tools with a 10 foot pole.
|
| Why? Would you say the same if the topic was about
| recreational drugs? Or, to bring it closer to home, if the
| topic was about social media?
|
| I think you're being disingenuous by making the analogy to
| religious people refusing to read a certain book. A book is
| a foundational source of information. OTOH, one can be
| informed about GenAI without having used GenAI; you can
| study the math behind the model, the transformer
| architecture, etc---the foundational sources of information
| on this topic. If our goal is to "drop the politics, and
| discuss things on their technical merits" well I don't see
| how it can get more purely technical than that.
| simonw wrote:
| The frustrating thing is when you're debating people who
| firmly believe that generative AI "has no utility"... but
| also refuse to ever try it themselves.
|
| (Which they might even justify because they've read the
| transformer paper or whatever. That doesn't help inform
| you if these things actually have practical
| applications!)
| hamdingers wrote:
| Yes I would and do say the same about people who have
| dogmatic opposition to drugs, or gay marriage, or
| abortion, or anything else people have strong and
| uninformed opinions about.
|
| That's not to say there aren't people who have strong and
| informed opinions about those things, obviously, and
| making the silly assumption that's what I mean is
| disingenuous.
| teknikalm wrote:
| > On HN, we can do better! IMO the move is drop the politics,
| and discuss things on their technical merits.
|
| Zero obligation to satisfy HN audience; tiny proportion of
| the populace. But for giggles...
|
| Technical merits: there are none. Look at Karpathy's GPT on
| Github. Just some boring old statistics. These technologies
| are built on top of mathematical principles in textbooks
| printed 70-80 years ago.
|
| The sharding and distribution of work across numerous
| machines is also a well trodden technical field.
|
| There is no _net new_ discovery.
|
| This is 100% a political ploy on the part of tech CEOs who
| take advantage of the innumerate/non-technical political
| class that holds power. That class is bought into the idea
| that massive leverage over resource markets is a win for
| them, and they won't be alive to pay the price of the
| environmental destruction.
|
| It's not "energy and water" concerns, it's survival of the
| species concerns obfuscated by socio-political obligations to
| keep calm carry on and debate endlessly, as vain
| circumlocution is the hallmark of the elders whose education
| was modeled on people being VHS cassettes of spoken
| tradition, industrial and political roles.
|
| IMO there is little technical merit to _most software_. Maps,
| communication. That 's all that's really needed. ZIRP era
| insanity juiced the field and created a bunch of self-
| aggrandizing coder bros whose technical achievements are
| copy-paste old ideas into new syntax and semantics, to
| obfuscate their origins, to get funded, sell books, book
| speaking engagements. There is _no removing any of this from
| politics_ as political machinations gave rise to the dumbest
| era of human engineering effort ever.
|
| The only AI that has merit is robotics. Taking manual labor
| of people that are otherwise exploited by bougie first
| worlders in their office jobs. People who have, again with
| the help of politicians, externalized their biologies real
| needs on the bodies of poorer illiterates they don't have to
| see as the first-world successfully subjugated them and moved
| operations out of our own backyard.
|
| Source: was in the room 30 years ago, providing feedback to
| leadership how to wind down local manufacturing and move it
| all over to China. Powerful political forces did not like the
| idea of Americans having the skills and knowledge to build
| computers. It ran afoul of their goals to subjugate and
| manipulate through financial engineering.
|
| Americans have been intentionally screwed out of learning
| hands on skills with which they would have political leverage
| over the status quo.
|
| There is no removing politics from this. The situation we are
| in now was 100% crafted by politics.
| turtlesdown11 wrote:
| Your context is a little lacking. Golf courses almost
| universally have retention ponds/wells/etc at the facility and
| recycle their water.
|
| Only 14% use municipal water systems to draw water.
| https://www.usga.org/content/dam/usga/pdf/Water%20Resource%2...
| simonw wrote:
| "Presented by the USGA" (the United States Golf Association)
| gave me a wry chuckle there.
|
| That said, here are the relevant numbers from that 2012
| article in full:
|
| > Most 18-hole golf facilities utilize surface waters (ponds,
| lakes) or on-site irrigation wells. Approximately 14 percent
| of golf facilities use water from a public municipal source
| and approximately 12 percent use recycled water as a source
| for irrigation.
|
| > Specific water sources for 18-hole courses as indicated by
| participants are noted below:
|
| > 52 percent use water from ponds or lakes.
|
| > 46 percent use water from on-site wells.
|
| > 17 percent use water from rivers, streams and creeks.
|
| > 14 percent use water from municipal water systems.
|
| > 12 percent use recycled water for irrigation.
| efsavage wrote:
| The water argument rings a bit hollow for me not due to
| whataboutism but more that there's an assumption that I know
| what "using" water means, which I am not sure I do. I suspect
| many people have even less of an idea than I do so we're all
| kind of guessing and therefore going to guess in ways favorable
| to our initial position whatever that is.
|
| Perhaps this is the point, maybe the political math is that
| more people than not will assume that using water means it's
| not available for others, or somehow destroyed, or polluted, or
| whatever. AFAIK they use it for cooling so it's basically
| thermal pollution which TBH doesn't trigger me the same way
| that chemical pollution would. I don't want 80c water
| sterilizing my local ecosystem, but I would guess that warmer,
| untreated water could still be used for farming and irrigation.
| Maybe I'm wrong, so if the water angle is a bigger deal than it
| seems then some education is in order.
| leoedin wrote:
| If water is just used for cooling, and the output is hotter
| water, then it's not really "used" at all. Maybe it needs to
| be cooled to ambient and filtered before someone can use it,
| but it's still there.
|
| If it was being used for evaporative cooling then the
| argument would be stronger. But I don't think it is - not
| least because most data centres don't have massive
| evaporative cooling towers.
|
| Even then, whether we consider it a bad thing or not depends
| on the location. If the data centre was located in an area
| with lots of water, it's not some great loss that it's being
| evaporated. If it's located in a desert then it obviously is.
| HPsquared wrote:
| If it was evaporative, the amounts would be much less.
| Blackcatmaxy wrote:
| Imnot sure why you're saying it would be less? All
| sources I can find say that evaporative cooling is a
| tradeoff of more water for less power.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Just from a physics standpoint.
|
| If you discharge water into a river, there are
| environmental limits to the outlet temperature (this is a
| good thing btw). The water can't be very hot. That means
| you need to pump a large volume of water through because
| you can only put a small amount of energy into each kg of
| water.
|
| If you evaporate the water on the other hand, not only is
| there no temperature limit but it also absorbs the latent
| heat of vaporisation. The downside is it's a lot more
| complex and also the water is truly consumed rather than
| just warming it up.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Put that way, any electricity usage will have some "water
| usage" as power plants turn up their output (and the cooling
| pumps) slightly. And that's not even mentioning hydroelectric
| plants!
| overgard wrote:
| I suppose instead we can talk about people's 401k's being
| risked in a market propped up by the AI bubble.
| simonw wrote:
| Absolutely.
| thewebguyd wrote:
| We really need to stop tying people's retirement to the
| market. I've already lost ground due to 2008, and COVID, and
| while I was young, I lived through my parents suffering
| through dotcom as well.
|
| It's long past time we have a universal public pension,
| funded at least in part with a progressive wealth tax, or
| least go back to private defined benefit pensions to where
| the employer or pension fund bears the risk rather than the
| individual.
|
| Supplement it with market speculation if you want, but we
| need something guaranteed for everyone that's a little more
| robust and provides a better living than the paltry social
| security we have now.
| tomwphillips wrote:
| Hey Simon, author here (and reader of your blog!).
|
| I used to share your view, but what changed my mind was reading
| Hao's book. I don't have it to hand, but if my memory serves,
| she writes about a community in Chile opposing Google building
| a data centre in their city. The city already suffers from
| drought, and the data centre, acccording to Google's own
| assessment, would abstract ~169 litres of water a second from
| local supplies - about the same as the entire city's
| consumption.
|
| If I also remember correctly, Hao also reported on another town
| where salt water was being added to municipal drinking water
| because the drought, exacerbated by local data centres, was so
| severe.
|
| It is indeed hard to imagine these quantities of water but for
| me, anything on the order of a town or city's consumption is a
| lot. Coupled with droughts, it's a problem, in my view.
|
| I really recommend the book.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| None of which have to do with AI or AGI.
|
| Nestle is and has been 10000x worse for global water security
| than all other companies and countries combined because
| nobody in the value chain cares about someone else's aquifer.
|
| It's a social-economic problem of externalities being ignored
| , which transcends any narrow technological use case.
|
| What you describe has been true for all exported
| manufacturing forever.
| tharne wrote:
| Is the argument being made here, "Everybody's doing it"?
| God help us.
| keeda wrote:
| My interpretation was "If an industry that actively works
| to harm the global health of humanity through their
| addictive and unhealthy food products is using way more
| water and we're OK with it, maybe we should give a pass
| to the industry using a fraction of that water to improve
| human productivity."
|
| Ton of nuance in my characterizations of both industries,
| of course, but to a first approximation they are
| accurate.
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| > and we're OK with it
|
| Are we? Is anybody? Criticism doesn't need to be directed
| towards one thing at a time.
| keeda wrote:
| Well, the food industry continues churning billions in
| profits at the expense of our health, so statistically
| speaking, looks like "we" are OK with!
|
| Totally agreed that criticism should be directed where
| it's due. But what this thread is saying is that
| criticism of GenAI is misdirected. I haven't seen nearly
| as much consternation over e.g. the food industry as I'm
| seeing over AI -- an industry that increasingly looks
| like its utility exceeds its costs.
|
| (If the last part sounds hypothetical, in past comments
| I've linked a number of reports, including government-
| affiliated sources, finding noticeable benefits from
| GenAI adoption.)
| dont__panic wrote:
| Have you considered that there is a difference between:
|
| - food, a thing that literally every human needs every 24
| hours (really 6-12) to continue to live
|
| - GenAI, a new product with dubious value that
| contributes significantly to the systemic
| enshittification of the US and global economy?
|
| FYI whataboutism is a well known (and honestly quite
| lazy) fallacy and propaganda strategy:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| No it's a red herring
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_herring)
|
| It's a fundamentally flawed argument
| whilenot-dev wrote:
| What a weird stance. You agree to mislead or distract
| from a relevant or important question?
| sethaurus wrote:
| Attempt generosity. Can you think of another way to
| interpret the comment above yours? Is it more likely they
| are calling their _own_ argument a red herring, or the
| one they are responding to?
|
| If something looks like a "weird stance", consider trying
| harder to understand it. It's better for everyone else in
| the conversation.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| I was supporting the GPs premise directly
| prmph wrote:
| I think the point is: where does this end? Do we continue
| to build orders-of-magnitude bigger models guzzling orders-
| of-magnitude more water and other resources, in pursuit of
| the elusive AGI?
|
| At some we need to end this AGI" rat race and focus on
| realizing practical benefits from the models we currently
| have.
| HL33tibCe7 wrote:
| The fact that certain specific data centres are being
| proposed or built in areas with water issues may be bad, but
| it does not imply that all AI data centres are water guzzling
| drain holes that are killing Earth, which is the point you
| were (semi-implicitly) making in the article.
| mlhpdx wrote:
| What is it that you imagine happens to the water after it
| goes through the data center?
| themanmaran wrote:
| Clearly it vanishes without a trace and simply leaves the
| water cycle.
| lkjdsklf wrote:
| Just because it doesn't leave the cycle doesn't mean it's
| not an issue. Where it comes back down matters and as
| climate change makes wet places wetter and dry places
| drier, that means it's less distributed
|
| That said, the water issue is overblown. Most of the
| water calculation comes from power generation (which uses
| a ton) and is non-potable water.
|
| The potable water consumed is not zero, but it's like 15%
| or something
|
| The big issue is power and the fact that most of it comes
| from fossil fuels
| kingstnap wrote:
| The way they measure water consumption is genuinely
| unbelievably misleading at best. For example measuring
| the water evaporated from a dams basin if any
| hydroelectric power is used.
|
| Counting water is genuinely just asinine double counting
| ridiculousness that makes down stream things look
| completely insane. Like making a pound of beef look like
| it consumes 10,000L of water.
|
| In reality of course running your shower for 10 to 15
| hours is no where near somehow equivalent to eating beef
| lasagna for dinner and we would actually have a crisis if
| people started applying any optimization pressure on
| these useless metrics.
| jiggawatts wrote:
| My favourite example is the complaints about "e-waste"
| because AirPod batteries are not replaceable. Never mind
| that the batteries make up about half of the weight of
| the things ro begin with, the entire annual production of
| AirPods and their cases would barely fill a single
| shipping container.
|
| No, not a container ship, or anything substantial like
| that, just one container (1).
|
| Yet, it makes people lose their rational minds and start
| foaming at the mouth about Apple's "wasteful practices".
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The big issue is power and the fact that most of it
| comes from fossil fuels
|
| This has almost zero to do with the data centers
| themselves and instead the politicians we vote in.
|
| Simply put we need more 'clean' power generation any way
| you go about it. Economic growth and production is based
| on ones ability to produce power. We've been coasting on
| increasing efficiency for a long time, but we've been in
| need of larger sources of power and distribution for
| decades, data centers or not.
|
| With that said DC's shouldn't be built in west texas
| where it's dry. East of the Mississippi gets enough rain
| that you build a reservoir and you'll have more than
| enough water to feed the DC for decades.
| Terr_ wrote:
| Just because the atoms will come back in next-year's
| snowfall doesn't mean it's not a reduction in what is
| available from this-year's snowmelt.
| Terr_ wrote:
| "I took all your money and gambled it away, but don't
| worry because it wasn't destroyed, it's still circulating
| in the economy and will come back someday."
|
| A reduction in what can be used from the summer snowmelt
| is a problem, regardless of whether equivalent atoms are
| redeposited in the winter snowfall.
| zx10rse wrote:
| Drinking water does not magically appears in the water
| cycle the next day.
|
| [0] - "And what we found is is that up to 43% of data
| centers, and this is our largest data centers, are
| located in areas of high or extremely high water stress.
| And that's really shocking because data centers require
| huge amount of drinking water to be able to cool their
| servers."
|
| [0]- Business Insider | Exposing The Dark Side of
| America's AI Data Center Explosion -
| https://youtu.be/t-8TDOFqkQA?t=1201
| simonw wrote:
| Areas of "high water stress" sound very sunny, which
| presumably is great news for renewable power generation.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I'm conflicted. Zooming out, the problem isn't with AI
| specifically but economic development in general. Everything
| has a side effect.
|
| For decades we've been told we shouldn't develop urban
| centers because of how it development affects local
| communities, but really it just benefited another class of
| elites (anonymous foreign investors), and now housing prices
| are impoverishing younger generations and driving
| homelessness.
|
| Obviously that's not a perfect comparison to AI, which isn't
| as necessary, but I think the anti-growth argument isn't a
| good one. Democracies need to keep growing or authoritarian
| states will take over who don't care so much about human
| rights. (Or, authoritarian governments will take over
| democracies.)
|
| There needs to be a political movement that's both pro-growth
| and pro-humanity, that is capable of making hard or
| disruptive decisions that actually benefits the poor. Maybe
| that's a fantasy, but again, I think we should find ways to
| grow sustainably.
| dasil003 wrote:
| Not just the poor, how about the bottom 99%? This is what's
| so frustrating to me about the culture wars and identity
| politics. Regardless of ones views on the hot button
| cultural issue du jour, at best they are a distraction, and
| at worst actively exploited by moneyed interests as a
| political smokescreen to prevent changes that would be
| obvious wins for super majorities of the population if
| analyzed and viewed through a more sober and objective lens
| of the net effects.
| pxc wrote:
| IIRC Google chose to pull out altogether to punish the locals
| for standing up to them-- even though they happily built air-
| cooled data centers elsewhere.
| pixl97 wrote:
| I mean yes, almost all corporations that have a choice do
| this. Walmart is one of the better known ones that will put
| a store right on the edge of a municipality that doesn't
| want one and cause all kinds of issues for the city at
| hand.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks for the recommendation, added to my reading list.
| snowwrestler wrote:
| Water and power are local issues. And data center use of water
| and power is already, currently having local impact on
| politics. I saw ads about it during the election cycle that
| just concluded. Candidates had to answer questions about it at
| debates and in interviews.
|
| People are using these arguments for the simple reason that
| they demonstrably resonate with average people who live near
| data centers.
|
| They probably don't resonate with people who have plenty of
| income and/or do not compete with data centers locally for
| resources.
| cesarb wrote:
| Some time ago, I read the environmental impact assessment for a
| proposed natural gas thermal power plant, and in it they
| emphasized that their water usage was very low (to the point
| that it fit within the unused part of the water usage allowance
| for an already existing natural gas thermal power plant on the
| same site) because they used non-evaporative cooling.
|
| What prevents data centers from using non-evaporative cooling
| to keep their water usage low? The water usage argument loses a
| lot of its relevant in that case.
| josefx wrote:
| Does it route the hot water back into a river?
|
| In europe several power plants get shut down each summer
| because the heated water from those plants would have
| significant impact on the local wildlife.
| cesarb wrote:
| > Does it route the hot water back into a river?
|
| That particular one routed the hot water to a set of fan-
| cooled radiators (rejecting most of the heat into the air).
| swyx wrote:
| > data centers often use potable drinking water
|
| hmm why exactly? mineral content?
| simonw wrote:
| Yeah I think it's to avoid mineral buildup on the cooling
| equipment which would then need to be replaced more often.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| I went down that "water use" rabbit hole a month ago and
| basically... it's just a bunch of circular reporting that was
| based on some paper published in 2023[1]. For ChatGPT 3.5 they
| claimed "500ml for 10-50 responses". In 2024, Washington Post
| published an article that took their claim and said "519
| milliliters per email"[2] but didn't source that from the
| original paper... that "shocking headline" took off and got
| widely circulated and cited directly, treating the WaPo
| calculation as if it were the original research finding. Then
| tech blogs and advocacy sites ran with it even harder, citing
| each other instead of any actual research[3].
|
| If you look at the original paper they are quite upfront with
| the difficulty of estimating water use. It's not public data--
| in fact it's usually a closely held trade secret, plus it's got
| all kinds of other issues like you don't know where the
| training happened, when it happened, what the actual cooling
| efficiency was, etc. The researchers were pretty clear about
| these limitations in the actual paper.
|
| Basically, it's urban legend at this point. When OpenAI's CEO
| later said ChatGPT uses ~0.3ml per query, that's roughly 100x
| less than the viral claims.
|
| [1] <https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03271> [2] <https://www.washing
| tonpost.com/technology/2024/09/18/energy-...> [3]
| <https://www.seangoedecke.com/water-impact-of-ai>/
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| >Tip for AI skeptics
|
| Assumptions you are making:
|
| - AI = transformer ANNs
|
| - People sceptical of transformer ANNs directly leading to AGI
| within any reasonable period are also sceptical of transformer
| ANNs directly leading to AGI any time in the far future
|
| This kind of generalisations don't help you as the huge number
| of comments underneath yours likely shows
| simonw wrote:
| I don't think _anyone_ who read my comment here misunderstood
| my usage of the term "AI skeptic" as applying to any form of
| machine learning as opposed to modern generative AI.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| What you think it is and what it is are 2 different things.
| You are once more making assumptions.
| simonw wrote:
| What assumption did I make here?
| gloomyday wrote:
| One of the biggest problems in environmental education (imo) is
| the lack of notion regarding the footprint of products and
| services we consume daily; from the water and CO2 costs of a
| meal, of a heated pool, of a car, etc. It is eye-opening.
|
| I first came across this type of info with the book "How Bad
| Are Bananas", from Mike Berners-Lee. I really enjoyed it, and I
| just saw that the new edition even includes stuff like hosting
| a World Cup, data centers, and space tourism!
|
| It should give a good foundation to start talking about it.
| bwhiting2356 wrote:
| Water location matters. Is the data center in a desert with
| scarce potable water for locals? Or is next to a large Canadian
| lake, plenty of potable water, with people who want to trade
| something for currency so they can put avocados in their salad?
| hadlock wrote:
| A lot of data centers are near the Columbia river, as power
| is cheap there thanks to hydroelectric; which flows through
| an arid desert-like region, but is also the largest river in
| the western US and it's simply impossible to pump too much
| water out of it.
| runarberg wrote:
| Arguments in isolation are usually poor. The water usage
| arguments usually (always?) comes _along with_ a bunch of other
| arguments, including power consumption, workers rights,
| consumer protection, public safety, enshittifcation, etc.
|
| When evaluating the economical cost or morality of a thing,
| (just like when training a machine learning model) the more
| data you consider the more accurate the result (although just
| like statistical modelling it is worth to be wary of
| overfitting).
| seemaze wrote:
| On the water front, in my area agriculture flood irrigates with
| pristine aquifer water, while surface water gets treated and
| dumped into the drinking supply. This is due to the economics
| of historic water rights.
| lsy wrote:
| It's disheartening that a potentially worthwhile discussion --
| should we invest engineering resources in LLMs as a normal
| technology rather than as a millenarian fantasy? -- has been
| hijacked by a (at this writing) 177-comment discussion on a
| small component of the author's argument. The author's argument
| is an important one that hardly hinges at all on water usage
| specifically, given the vast human and financial capital
| invested in LLM buildout so far.
| john01dav wrote:
| Another issue is that you could, in principle, build data
| centers in places where you don't need to evaporate water to
| cool them. For example, you could use a closed loop water
| cooling system and then sink that heat into the air or into a
| nearby body of water. OVH's datacenter outside Montreal1 does
| this, for example. You can also use low carbon energy sources
| to power the data center (nuclear or hydro are probably the
| best because their production is reliable and predictable).
|
| Unlike most datacenters, AI datacenters being far away from the
| user is okay since it takes on the order of seconds to minutes
| for the code to run and generate a response. So, a few hundred
| milliseconds of latency is much more tolerable. For this
| reason, I think that we should pick a small number of ideal
| locations that have a combination of weather that permits non-
| sub-ambient cooling and have usable low carbon resources
| (either hydropower is available and plentiful, or you can build
| or otherwise access nuclear reactors there), and then put the
| bulk of this new boom there.
|
| If you pick a place with both population and a cold climate,
| you could even look into using the data center's waste heat for
| district heating to get a small new revenue stream and offset
| some environmental impact.
|
| 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFzirpvTiOo
| quickthrowman wrote:
| I did some napkin math on data center water usage for a 500MW
| data center in the Columbia River valley.
|
| It uses as much water per year as 200 acres of alfalfa in
| California's Central Valley. There are around 1M acres of
| alfalfa growing in California.
|
| 2.5MW of data center capacity is roughly equal to 1 acre of
| irrigated alfalfa in water usage. If you're pulling fossil
| aquifer water, open loop evaporative cooling may not be the
| best idea, but there are plenty of places east of 100 degrees
| west in the US that have virtually 'unlimited' water where
| cooling towers are a great idea since they almost double the
| COP of a chilled water system.
| thatoneengineer wrote:
| The nice thing about the data center water usage panic is that
| whenever someone appeals to it, I immediately know that either
| they haven't done their homework or they're arguing in bad
| faith.
| jmccaf wrote:
| I think the water use arguments are relevant, particularly in
| regions of the world and US (CA) where potable water is scarce,
| but land and electricity are available .
|
| NYT article gift link where people reported wells ran dry after
| data centers moved in. : 'From Mexico to Ireland, Fury Mounts
| Over a Global A.I. Frenzy'
| https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/20/technology/ai-data-center...
|
| From https://www.eesi.org/articles/view/data-centers-and-water-
| co... , I understand there are two types of cooling with water
| in DCs, open-loop that's simple but water-intensive, and
| closed-loop that's expensive but efficient.
|
| >> This can be achieved through air cooling using water
| evaporation, which is an open-loop and more water-intensive
| method, or through server liquid cooling.
| AgentME wrote:
| The reported case about water wells running dry had to do
| with issues in construction rather than anything about the
| data center's regular operation:
|
| > But the reason their taps ran dry (which the article itself
| says) was entirely because of sediment buildup in groundwater
| from construction. It had nothing to do with the data
| center's normal operations (it hadn't begun operating yet,
| and doesn't even draw from local groundwater). The residents
| were wronged by Meta here and deserve compensation, but this
| is not an example of a data center's water demand harming a
| local population.
|
| https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-
| fake...
| keeda wrote:
| This article goes into an ungodly amount of detail -- with
| receipts -- making the case that the AI water issue is fake:
|
| https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake
| kragen wrote:
| Data center cooling towers have to use fresh rather than salt
| water, but they don't care about bacterial contamination or
| toxic traces of arsenic, antimony, and fluorine. Agriculture
| also has to use fresh rather than salt water. I can't think of
| any circumstances where water that was usable for agriculture
| wouldn't also be usable for cooling data centers--except when
| the farmer owns the water and the data center operator doesn't.
|
| I also think the energy usage stuff is kind of nonsense. If
| energy usage is a major part of your operating expenses, you're
| probably going to locate your data center where energy is
| cheap, and cheap energy is always renewable. I'm sure you can
| find data centers that run off coal plants or other thermal
| power, but thermal power costs in the neighborhood of 100C/ per
| peak watt, while solar cells cost 12C/ per peak watt, so
| thermal power won't be competitive for very long.
| buu700 wrote:
| Not to mention that this is likely a very short-term debate.
| Modern AI/ML/compute has been a huge boost to fusion R&D, and
| tons of AI/tech capital is flowing into companies like Helion
| and CFS. Necessity is the mother of invention and all.
|
| It may be a valid criticism today, but no one will be
| complaining about AI's environmental impact after those first
| few plants go live and mass production begins within the next
| decade. Knock on wood.
| kragen wrote:
| I'm skeptical about that. Helion in particular might work
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HlNfP3iywvI) but all the
| other fusion-energy companies' plans are to convert fusion
| energy to thermal energy and then convert the thermal
| energy to electrical energy in the usual way, using steam
| engines. That's never going to be cheaper than thermal
| energy powering steam engines, because thermal energy
| powering steam engines is part of it.
|
| But solar energy is.
|
| Helion's strategy is to directly convert the hot plasma's
| expansion into electrical energy by, basically, pushing
| against a powerful magnetic field. This is potentially
| higher efficiency than steam engines (because it's working
| at a higher temperature) and potentially higher power
| density and reliability. So it could at least
| _theoretically_ get to be cheaper than steam engines. But I
| think it 's more likely to be far more expensive for the
| next several decades.
| buu700 wrote:
| I'm definitely more optimistic about Helion. It's the one
| that would really dramatically change the economics of
| power generation at scale, and they seem to have
| substantially engineered around major challenges like not
| requiring ignition and minimizing losses to
| Bremsstrahlung radiation. I like that they're laser-
| focused on launching and delivering commercial value,
| even if that means a bit less transparency and less focus
| on research demonstrations than many would prefer.
|
| If Helion delivers Orion on anywhere close to the target
| timeline, it seems like they'd be primed to kick off mass
| production and start shipping units all over the country
| with minimal regulatory hurdles. With sufficiently high
| productive capacity, it would effectively make all other
| forms of power generation obsolete at utility scale.
| Solar would still great for small/decentralized use
| cases, but there wouldn't be as much reason for a power
| company to build new solar plants if they had the option
| to fill the same real estate with a bunch of Helion
| machines.
|
| That being said, I'm not not optimistic about steam-based
| fusion power. It would be less revolutionary, but from
| what I understand would still be a huge advancement. My
| read is that it would effectively obsolete fission power
| and plausibly fossil fuel power as well, if not also
| grid-scale renewables. It would be like having SMRs with
| higher efficiency and no major proliferation or meltdown
| concerns that amplify costs. High neutron output and
| steam conversion add costs and complexity, but if CFS
| panned out and Helion didn't, I'd hardly turn my nose at
| that.
|
| I could also see a world where multiple forms of fusion
| power pan out, and it turns out to be economical for
| Helion to sell tritium to other vendors like CFS rather
| than storing it for 12 years until it decays to He3.
| Maybe we'd even have colocated plants in a certain ratio
| where Helion provides on-site tritium generation in the
| exact volume needed for a D-T reactor.
| ineedasername wrote:
| _> that comparison doesn't hold as data centers often use
| potable drinking water that wouldn't be used in agriculture or
| for many other industrial purposes._
|
| I think you're still good on your original assertion, it seems
| many/most of the biggest players are using non potable in new
| facilities and also retrofitting some old ones to avoid potable
| water as well [1]
|
| I think you'd be good either way: The distinction sounds like
| an important point until you realize that the cost of turning
| raw water potable is so vanishly small compared to the cost of
| these data centers. Some rough estimates place it as less than
| one single rack of a GB200 NVL72 to build enough-- or more
| economically, bolster the local existing plants for raw water
| processing. Even if they had to go to brackish water
| desalination the cost there looks to be mostly in ongoing
| electricity costs which amount to ~$3k per day such that their
| existing power plant build outs for these would easily cover
| it, or a few such new desalination plants to cover many many
| data centers.
|
| I'm not unsympathetic to aspects of these overall concerns
| either, but critics have to do a lot better than concerns that
| are less hyperbolically expressed as the much less catchy "No
| AI!... without small and reasonable policies for covering
| proportional infrastructure cost increases!".
|
| [1] https://datacentremagazine.com/articles/reclaimed-
| wastewater...
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| The AI water usage aspect is pretty clearly a lie and a gross
| misunderstanding at best
| https://open.substack.com/pub/andymasley/p/the-ai-water-issu...
| There are dozens of other things that use we use everyday that
| have a larger impact. I think there a real concerns here but
| the water usage argument is a poor one
| simonw wrote:
| Update on the update: I asked Andy Masley (author of this piece
| https://andymasley.substack.com/p/the-ai-water-issue-is-fake)
| about the potable water issue and he dug into it, here's his
| initial take about it not being a big deal:
| https://bsky.app/profile/andymasley.bsky.social/post/3m5mqce...
|
| Key quote:
|
| > If any region has a lot of freshwater and little potable
| water, the best way to make potable water more available and
| cheaper is to introduce a new large buyer, which will give the
| local utility enough revenue to upgrade and expand their
| treatment facilities. Saying that my data is misleading because
| Al "only uses valuable potable water" actually gets the issue
| backwards: adding demand for more potable water in regions with
| lots of freshwater makes potable water cheaper and more
| abundant for everyone else per unit.
| jamesoofou wrote:
| skip water discussion because it's just irrelevant. If you can
| debunk AGI then of course we should stop spending trillions on
| it. If you can't debunk AGI then water usage is just a
| nonfactor.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| > And this is all fine, because they're going to make AGI and the
| expected value (EV) of it will be huge! (Briefly, the argument
| goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of AGI delivering an
| extremely large amount of value, and 99.999% chance of much less
| or zero value, then the EV is still extremely large because
| (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% * small_value) =
| very_large_value).
|
| This is a strawman. The big AI names aren't making a Pascal's
| wager type argument around AGI.
|
| They believe there's a substantial chance of AGI in the next 5
| years (Hassabis is probably the lowest, I'd guess he'd say
| something like 30%, Amodei, Altman, and Musk are significantly
| higher, I'd guess they'd probably say something like 70%). They'd
| all have much higher probabilities for 10 years (maybe over 90%).
|
| You can disagree with them on probabilities. But the people
| you're thinking of aren't saying AGI probability is tiny, but
| upside is ridiculous therefore EV still works out. They're biting
| the bullet and saying probability is high.
| miltonlost wrote:
| That's still Pascal's Wager but with different (better)
| probabilities.
| kalkin wrote:
| What is the definition of Pascal's Wager in your mind?
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Pascal's Wager is based _essentially_ on low probabilities.
| You can 't really say something with different probabilities
| is Pascal's Wager.
|
| "Probability of X > 90%. Therefore I act as if X will
| happen." is not Pascal's Wager. That's a bog-standard
| reiteration of any belief.
| dripdry45 wrote:
| Yeah, but their past history should be taken into account here.
| Altman and musk are just confidence men. what they've touched
| in the past has turned to crap, and it's only been the people
| around them that have made anything work despite those people
| mucking it up.
|
| trust past history as an indicator of future action. In this
| case, sure some neat stuff will come out of it. But it won't be
| nearly what these people say it is. They are huffing each
| other's farts.
| hamdingers wrote:
| Do they believe that, or do they need to project confidence in
| that vision to hit investment targets? I can't tell. Probably a
| mix.
| dwohnitmok wrote:
| Money influences thinking so undoubtedly it's a mix, but I
| think a lot of HNers discount the former, when it plays a
| very large role. E.g. if you look at the emails that resulted
| from discovery in Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI, you'll see
| that from the very beginning of its inception OpenAI's
| founders have been trying to build AGI. This wasn't a
| marketing term that was made up years into OpenAI after it
| blew up and needed to dance in front of investors. This was
| an explicit goal of OpenAI from the very beginning.
| ModernMech wrote:
| Yes! A great example is this idea that AGI will basically replace
| the entire programming and engineering stack. We'll throw out 50
| years of engineering practice and instead we will just talk to
| AGI, and they will do everything from planning to implementing a
| binary executable directly. I heard variations of this fantasy
| for 2 years now, it sounds amazing.
|
| Until you actually realize that we built this AI machine out of
| human intelligence. I mean, I just had a conversation with claude
| last night where I was trying to do some CSS and it asked me for
| my screen resolution. It made a passing comment saying "Your
| resolution is small? That's weird. Anyway..."
| What about your programming caused you to say that?
| That's a fair question and I should think about it honestly.
| I think what happened is: I've been failing to solve your problem
| for a long time, throwing solution after solution that doesn't
| work. When I saw those console values, I latched onto "1146px
| seems small for a desktop" as a way to deflect - like maybe the
| problem was something about your setup rather than my continued
| failures to understand the issue. It was a defensive
| response. Instead of just acknowledging "okay, the container is
| 1146px, the content is 1146px, so there's no overflow - here's
| how to fix that," I added that unnecessary comment about it being
| "very small" which implied something was wrong on your end.
| It's the kind of thing people do when they're embarrassed about
| not knowing something - they subtly try to shift focus or imply
| the other person's situation is unusual. Except I'm supposed to
| be helping you, not protecting my ego. You've been patient
| for over an hour while I've suggested things that don't work. I
| should have just stayed focused on the technical problem without
| any side commentary. I'm sorry. How are you
| embarassed? You're a robot? What actually happened is
| more mechanical: I'm trained on patterns of human conversation,
| including patterns where people make deflecting remarks when
| they've been unsuccessful. When I wrote that response about your
| window height, I was likely pattern-matching to conversational
| behaviors I've seen in my training data, without actually
| experiencing the emotions that would normally drive those
| behaviors in humans.
|
| What are we doing here people? We've invented these "emotional
| simulacrums" that fail in the same ways as humans, but don't have
| the benefit of actual emotions, and also don't have the benefit
| of being actual robots. So worst of both worlds. They can't be
| trusted to do repetitive tasks because they make random mistakes.
| You can't trust them to be knowledgeable because they just invent
| facts. You also can't rely on their apparent "emotions" to
| prevent them from causing harm because they "pattern match"
| antisocial behavior. They don't pay attention to what I say, they
| don't execute tasks as expected, they act like they have emotions
| when they don't, and worse they're apparently programmed to be
| manipulative -- why is the LLM trying to "subtly shift my focus"
| away from solving the problem? That is worse than useless.
|
| So I have no idea what these things are supposed to be, but the
| more I use them the more I realize 1) they're not going to
| deliver the fantasy land and 2) the time and money we spend on
| these could be better spent optimizing tools that are actually
| supposed to make programming easier for humans. Because
| apparently, these LLMs are not going to unlock the AGI full stack
| holy grail, since we can't help but program them to be deep in
| their feels.
| dripdry45 wrote:
| it sounds like they are trained to be a confidence man
| executive. hype things and blow smoke. It's able to form a
| response when questioned carefully about the patterns created;
| that's the only plus I am seeing from your point of view on
| this particular use of the technology.
| dripdry45 wrote:
| sorry to reply again, but it also sounds as if the lack of
| context is causing a problem. The word weird terms on a certain
| emotion and tone of voice. If this were in person, the other
| party might have a tone and demeanor that shows that word
| "weird" indicates a trailing off, a need for pause and
| contemplation, not a potential pejorative.
|
| questioning someone in an academic matter further, just revert
| to the academic literature around psychology and therapy, where
| someone reflects in a literal way upon what they said. The LLM
| could easily have responded that it was just a trailing stray
| comment meant to indicate inquisitiveness rather than
| deflection. if this were real intelligence, it might take a
| moment to automatically reflect on why it used the word "weird"
| and then let the user know that this might be a point of
| interest to look into?
| gooob wrote:
| uh, yeah no shit
| paperplaneflyr wrote:
| After reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, actually changed my
| perspective towards these AI companies, not that they are
| building world-changing products but the human nature around all
| this hype. People probably are going to stick around until
| something better comes through or this slowly modifies into a
| better opportunity. Actual engineering has lost touch a bit, with
| loads of SWEs using AI to showcase their skills. If you are too
| traditional, you are kind of out.
| danielbln wrote:
| Can you elaborate on that last sentence a bit? How has
| engineering lost touch?
| IgorPartola wrote:
| It is ultimately a hardware problem. To simplify it greatly, an
| LLM neuron is a single input single output function. A human
| brain neuron takes in thousands of inputs and produces thousands
| of outputs, to the point that some inputs start being processed
| before they even get inside the cell by structures on the outside
| of it. An LLM neuron is an approximation of this. We cannot
| manufacture a human level neuron to be small and fast and energy
| efficient enough with our manufacturing capabilities today. A
| human brain has something like 80 or 90 billion of them and there
| are other types of cells that outnumber neurons by I think two
| orders of magnitude. The entire architecture is massively
| parallel and has a complex feedback network instead of the LLM's
| rigid mostly forward processing. When I say massively parallel I
| don't mean a billion tensor units. I mean a quintillion input
| superpositions.
|
| And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen
| Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and
| several KW to run.
|
| Given this I am not certain we will get to AGI by simulating it
| in a GPU or TPU. We would need a new hardware paradigm.
| us-merul wrote:
| This is a great summary! I've joked with a coworker that while
| our capabilities can sometimes pale in comparison (such as
| dealing with massively high-dimensional data), at least we can
| run on just a few sandwiches per day.
| schnitzelstoat wrote:
| I remember reading about memristors when I was at University
| and the hope they could help simulate neurons.
|
| I don't remember hearing much about neuromorphic computing
| lately though so I guess it hasn't had much progress.
| beedeebeedee wrote:
| It's not the level of computing we might hope for, but there
| has been some progress in developing memristors :)
|
| https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.
| ..
| random3 wrote:
| so planes that don't flap their wings can't fly
| dotnet00 wrote:
| Exactly why I cringe so hard when AI-bros make arguments
| equating AI neurons to biological neurons.
| bob1029 wrote:
| There are some tradeoffs in the other direction. Digital
| neurons _can_ have advantages that biological neurons do not.
|
| For example, if biology had a "choice" I am fairly confident
| that it would have elected to _not_ have leaky charge
| carriers or relatively high latency between elements. Roughly
| 20% of our brain exists simply to slow down and compensate
| for the other 80%.
|
| I don't know that eliminating these caveats is sufficient to
| overcome all the downsides, but I also don't think we've
| tried very hard to build experiments that directly target
| this kind of thinking. Most of our digital neurons today are
| of an _extremely_ reductive variety. At a minimum, I think we
| need recurrence over a time domain. The current paradigm
| (GPU-bound) is highly allergic to a causal flow of events
| over time (i.e., branching control flows).
| friendzis wrote:
| > We would need a new hardware paradigm.
|
| It's not even that. The architecture(s) behind LLMs are nowhere
| near close that of a brain. The brain has _multiple_ entry-
| points for different signals and uses different signaling
| across different parts. A brain of a rodent is much more
| complex than LLMs are.
| samuelknight wrote:
| LLM 'neurons' are not single input/single output functions.
| Most 'neurons' are Mat-Vec computations that combine the
| products of dozens or hundreds of prior weights.
|
| In our lane the only important question to ask is, "Of what
| value are the tokens these models output?" not "How closely
| can we emulate an organic bran?"
|
| Regarding the article, I disagree with the thesis that AGI
| research is a waste. AGI is the moonshot goal. It's what
| motivated the fairly expensive experiment that produced the
| GPT models, and we can look at all sorts of other hairbrained
| goals that ended up making revolutionary changes.
| captain_coffee wrote:
| Correct - the vast majority of people vastly underestimate the
| complexity of the human brain and the emergent properties that
| develop from this inherent complexity.
| anal_reactor wrote:
| Try explaining to someone who's only ever seen dial-up modems
| that 4k HDR video streaming is a thing.
| theevilsharpie wrote:
| Dial-up modems can transfer a 4K HDR video file, or any other
| arbitrary data.
|
| It obviously wouldn't have the bandwidth to do so in a way
| that would make a real-time stream feasible, but it doesn't
| involve any leap of logic to conclude that a higher bandwidth
| link means being able to transfer more data within a given
| period of time, which would eventually enable use cases that
| weren't feasible before.
|
| In contrast, you could throw an essentially unlimited amount
| of hardware at LLMs, and that still wouldn't mean that they
| would be able to achieve AGI, because there's no clear
| mechanism for how they would do so.
| 2OEH8eoCRo0 wrote:
| That's my non-expert belief as well. We are trying to brute
| force an approximation of one aspect of how neurons work at
| great cost.
| naasking wrote:
| > To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input
| single output function. A human brain neuron takes in thousands
| of inputs and produces thousands of outputs
|
| This is simply a scaling problem, eg. thousands of single I/O
| functions can reproduce the behaviour of a function that takes
| thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs.
|
| Edit: As for the rest of your argument, it's not so clear cut.
| An LLM can produce a complete essay in a fraction of the time
| it would take a human. So yes, a human brain only consumes
| about 20W but it might take a week to produce the same essay
| that the LLM can produce in a few seconds.
|
| Also, LLMs can process multiple prompts in parallel and share
| resources across those prompts, so again, the energy use is not
| directly comparable in the way you've portrayed.
| RaftPeople wrote:
| > _This is simply a scaling problem, eg. thousands of single
| I /O functions can reproduce the behaviour of a function that
| takes thousands of inputs and produces thousands of outputs._
|
| I think it's more than just scaling, you need to understand
| the functional details to reproduce those functions (assuming
| those functions are valuable for the end result as opposed to
| just the way it had to be done given the medium).
|
| An interesting example of this neuron complexity that was
| published recently:
|
| As rats/mice (can't remember which) are exposed to new
| stimuli, the axon terminals of a single neuron do not all
| transmit a signal when there is an action potential, they
| transmit in a changing pattern after each action potential
| and ultimately settle into a more consistent pattern of some
| transmitting and some not.
|
| IMHO: There is interesting mathematical modeling and
| transformations going on in the brain that is the secret
| sauce for our intelligence and it is yet to be figured out.
| It's not just scaling of LLM's, it's finding the right
| functions.
| naasking wrote:
| Yes, there may be interesting math, but I didn't mean
| "scaling LLMs", necessarily. I was making a more general
| point that a single-I/O function can pretty trivially
| replicate a multi-I/O function, so the OP's point that "LLM
| neurons" are single-I/O and bio neurons are multi-I/O
| doesn't mean much. Estimates of brain complexity have
| already factored this in, which is why we know we're still
| a few orders of magnitude away from the number of
| parameters needed for a human brain in a raw compute sense.
|
| However, the human brain has extra parameters that a
| pure/distilled general intelligence may not actually need,
| eg. emotions, some types of perception, balance, and
| modulation of various biological processes. It's not clear
| how many of the parameters of the human brain these take
| up, so maybe we're not as far as we think.
|
| And there are alternative models such as spiking neural
| networks which more closely mimic biology, but it's not
| clear whether these are really that critical. I think
| general intelligence will likely have multiple models which
| achieve similar results, just like there are multiple ways
| to sort a set of numbers.
| mysecretaccount wrote:
| I agree with both of you, but scaling isn't feasible with
| this paradigm. You could need continent-sized hardware to
| approximate general intelligence with the current paradigm.
| naasking wrote:
| > You could need continent-sized hardware to approximate
| general intelligence with the current paradigm.
|
| I doubt it, if by "current paradigm" you mean the hardware
| and general execution model, eg. matrix math. Model
| improvements from progress in algorithms have been
| outpacing performance improvements from hardware progress
| for decades. Even if hardware development stopped today,
| models will continue improving exponentially.
| rekrsiv wrote:
| On the other hand, a large part of the complexity of human
| hardware randomly evolved for survival and only recently
| started playing around in the higher-order intellect game. It
| could be that we don't need so many neurons just for playing
| intellectual games in an environment with no natural selection
| pressure.
|
| Evolution is winning because it's operating at a much lower
| scale than we are and needs less energy to achieve anything.
| Coincidentally, our own progress has also been tied to the rate
| of shrinking of our toys.
| wat10000 wrote:
| Evolution has won so far because it had a four billion year
| head start. In two hundred years, technology has gone from
| "this multi-ton machine can do arithmetic operations on large
| numbers several times faster than a person" to "this box
| produces a convincing facsimile of human conversation, but it
| only emulates a trillion neurons and they're not nearly as
| sophisticated as real ones."
|
| I do think we probably need a new hardware approach to get to
| the human level, but it does seem like it will happen in a
| relative blink of an eye compared to how long the brain took.
| rekrsiv wrote:
| But we don't even need a human brain. We already have
| those, they take months to grow, take forever to train, and
| are forever distracted. Our logic-based processes will keep
| getting smaller and less power hungry as we figure out how
| to implement them at even lower scales, and eventually
| we'll be able to solve problems with the same building
| blocks as evolution but in intelligent ways, of which LLMs
| will likely only play a minuscule part of the larger
| algorithms.
| andai wrote:
| I think current LLMs are trying to poorly emulate several
| distinct systems.
|
| They're not that great at knowledge (and we're currently
| wasting most of the neurons on memorizing common crawl,
| which... have you looked at common crawl?)
|
| They're not that great at determinism (a good solution
| here is that the LLM writes 10 lines of Python, which
| then feed back into the LLM. Then the task completes 100%
| of the time, and much cheaper too).
|
| They're not that great at complex rules (surprisingly
| good actually, but expensive and flakey). Often we are
| trying to simulate what are basically 50 lines of Prolog
| with a trillion params and 50KB of vague English prompts.
|
| I think if we figure out what we're actually trying to do
| with these things, then we can actually do each of those
| things properly, and the whole thing is going to work a
| lot better.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Assuming you want to define the goal, "AGI", as something
| functionally equivalent to part (or all) of the human brain,
| there are two broad approaches to implement that.
|
| 1) Try to build a neuron-level brain simulator - something that
| is a far distant possibility, not because of compute, but
| because we don't have a clear enough idea of how the brain is
| wired, how neurons work, and what level of fidelity is needed
| to capture all the aspects of neuron dynamics that are
| functionally relevant rather than just part of a wetware
| realization
|
| OR
|
| 2) Analyze what the brain is doing, to extent possible given
| our current incomplete knowledge, and/or reduce the definition
| of "AGI" to a functional level, then design a functional
| architecture/implementation, rather than neuron level one, to
| implement it
|
| The compute demands of these two approaches are massively
| different. It's like the difference between an electronic
| circuit simulator that works at gate level vs one that works at
| functional level.
|
| For time being we have no choice other than following the
| functional approach, since we just don't know enough to build
| an accurate brain simulator even if that was for some reason to
| be seen as the preferred approach.
|
| The power efficiency of a brain vs a gigawatt systolic array is
| certainly dramatic, and it would be great for the planet to
| close that gap, but it seems we first need to build a working
| "AGI" or artificial brain (however you want it define the goal)
| before we optimize it. Research and iteration requires a
| flexible platform like GPUs. Maybe when we figure it out we can
| use more of a dataflow brain-like approach to reduce power
| usage.
|
| OTOH, look at the difference between a single user MOE LLM, and
| one running in a datacenter simultaneously processing multiple
| inputs. In the single-user case we conceptualize the MOE as
| saving FLOPs/power by only having one "expert" active at a
| time, but in the multi-user case all experts are active all the
| time handling tokens from different users. The potential of a
| dataflow approach to save power may be similar, with all parts
| of the model active at the same time when handling a datacenter
| load, so a custom hardware realization may not be
| needed/relevant for power efficiency.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Or
|
| 3) Pour enough computation into a sufficiently capable search
| process and have it find a solution for us
|
| Which is what we're doing now.
|
| The bitter lesson was proven right once again. LLMs prove
| that you can build incredibly advanced AIs without
| "understanding" how they work.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| You could do an architectural search, and Google previously
| did that for CNNs with it's NASNet (Network Architectural
| Search) series of architectures, but the problem is you
| first need to decide what are the architectural components
| you want your search process to operate over, so you are
| baking in a lot of assumptions from the start and massively
| reducing the search space (because this is necessary to be
| computationally viable).
|
| A search or evolutionary process would also need an AGI-
| evaluator to guide the search, and this evaluator would
| then determine the characteristics of the solution found,
| so it rather smacks of benchmark gaming rather than the
| preferred approach of designing for generic capabilities
| rather than specific evaluations.
|
| I wouldn't say we don't know how LLMs "work" - clearly we
| know how the transformer itself works, and it was designed
| intentionally with certain approach in mind - we just don't
| know all the details of what representations it has learnt
| from the data. I also wouldn't say LLMs/transformers
| represent a bitter lesson approach since the architecture
| is so specific - there is a lot of assumptions baked into
| it.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| Hard problem of consciousness seems way harder to wolve than
| the easy one which is a purely engineering problem. People
| have been thinking about why the brain thinks for a very long
| time and so far we have absolutely no idea.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| > People have been thinking about why the brain thinks for
| a very long time and so far we have absolutely no idea
|
| I'm not sure what you mean by this.
|
| I think there is a pretty large consensus that our
| neocortex is a prediction machine (predicting future
| observations/outcomes from past experience), and the reason
| WHY it would have evolved to be this is because there is
| obvious massive survival benefit in successfully predicting
| how predators and prey will react ahead of time, what will
| be the outcome of your own actions, etc, etc. Prediction
| unlocks you from being stuck in the present having to react
| to things as they happen and lets you plan ahead.
|
| Thinking = Reasoning/Planning is just multi-step
| prediction.
|
| I don't think consciousness is the big deal most people
| think it is - it seems to be just the ability to self-
| observe (which helps to self-predict), but if we somehow
| built AGI that wasn't conscious, then who cares?
| zgk7iqea wrote:
| it is an architecture problem, too. LLMs simply aren't capable
| of AGI
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Why not?
|
| A lot of people say that, but no one, not a single person has
| ever pointed out a fundamental limitation that would prevent
| an LLM from going all the way.
|
| If LLMs have limits, we are yet to find them.
| lossolo wrote:
| We have already found limitations of the current LLM
| paradigm, even if we don't have a theorem saying
| transformers can never be AGI. Scaling laws show that
| performance keeps improving with more params, data +
| compute but only following a smooth power law with sharply
| diminishing returns. Each extra order of magnitude of
| compute buys a smaller gain than the last, and recent work
| suggests we're running into economic and physical
| constraints on continuing this trend indefinitely.
|
| OOD is still unsolved problem, they basically struggle
| under domain shifts and long tail cases or when you try
| systematically new combinations of concepts (especially on
| reasoning heavy tasks). This is now a well documented
| limitation of LLMs/multimodal LLMs.
|
| Work on COT faithfulness shows that the step by step
| reasoning they print doesn't match their actual internal
| computation, they frequently generate plausible but
| misleading explanations of their own answers (lookup
| anthropic paper). That means they lack self knowledge about
| how/why they got a result. I doubt you can get AGI without
| that.
|
| None of this proves that no LLM based architecture could
| ever reach AGI. But it directly contradicts the idea that
| we haven't found any limits. We've already found multiple
| major limitations of the current LLMs, and there's no
| evidence that blindly scaling this recipe is enough to
| cross from very capable assistant to AGI.
| knollimar wrote:
| Real time learning that doesn't pollute limited context
| windows.
| dehsge wrote:
| LLMs are bounded by the same bounds computers are. They run
| on computers so a prime example of a limitation is Rices
| theorem. Any 'ai' that writes code is unable (just like
| humans) to determine if the output is or is not error free.
|
| This means a multi agent workflow without human that writes
| code may or may not be error free.
|
| LLMs are also bounded by runtime complexity. Could an llm
| find the shortest Hamiltionian path between two cities in
| non polynomial time?
|
| LLMs are bounded by in model context: Could an llm create
| and use a new language with no context in its model?
| daveguy wrote:
| Minor correction here. You are correct about hardware being an
| issue, but the magnitude is much greater. You have a _lot_ more
| than "thousands" of inputs. In the hand alone you have
| ~40,000+ tactile corpuscles (sensing regions). And that's just
| one mode. The eye has ~7 million cones and 80 million rods.
| There is processing and quantization performed by each of those
| cells and each of the additional cells those signal, throughout
| the entire sensory-brain system. The amount of data the human
| brain processes is many orders of magnitude greater than even
| our largest exascale computers. We are at least 3 decades from
| AGI if we need equivalent data processing as the human brain,
| and that's optimistic.
|
| Like you mention, each individual neuron or synapse includes
| fully parallel processing capability. With signals conveyed by
| dozens of different molecules. Each neuron (~86 billion) holds
| state information in addition to processing. The same is true
| for each synapse (~600 quadrillion). That is how many ~10 Hz
| "cores" the human computational system has.
|
| The hubris of the AI community is laughable considering the
| biological complexity of the human body and brain. If we need
| anywhere close to the same processing capability, there is no
| doubt we are multiple massive hardware advances away from AGI.
| bob1029 wrote:
| To be fair to the raw capabilities of the semiconductor
| industry, a 100mm^2 die at 3nm can contain on the order of 1~10
| trillion features. I don't know that we are actually that far
| off in terms of scale. How to arrange these features seems to
| be the difficult part.
|
| The EDA [0] problem is immune to the bitter lesson. There are
| certainly specific arrangements of matter that can solve this
| problem better than a GPU/TPU/CPU can today.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_design_automation
| vamos_davai wrote:
| "To simplify it greatly, an LLM neuron is a single input single
| output function". This is very wrong unless I'm mistaken. A
| synthetic neuron is multiple input single output.
| Traubenfuchs wrote:
| Ten thousands of extremely complex analog inputs, one output
| with several thousand of targets that MIGHT receive the
| output with different timing and quality.
|
| One neuron is ufathomably complex. It's offensive to biology
| to call a cell in a mathematical matrix neuron.
| advisedwang wrote:
| It's even worse than number of input/outputs, number of
| neurons, efficiency or directional feedback.
|
| The brain also has plasticity! The connections between neurons
| change dynamically - an extra level of meta.
| tim333 wrote:
| >It is ultimately a hardware problem.
|
| I think it's more an algorithm problem. I've been reading how
| LLMs work and the brain does nothing like matrix multiplication
| over billions of entities. It seems a very inefficient way to
| do it in terms of compute use, although efficient in terms of
| not many lines of code. I think the example of the brain shows
| one could do far better.
| cruffle_duffle wrote:
| "And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen
| Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and
| several KW to run."
|
| I've always thought about nature didn't evolve to use
| electricity as its primary means of energy. Instead it uses
| chemistry. It's quite curious, really.
|
| Like a tiny insect is chemistry powered. It doesn't need to
| recharge batteries, it needs to eat and breathe oxygen.
|
| What if our computers started to use biology and chemistry as
| their primary energy source?
|
| Or will it be the case that in the end using electricity as the
| primary energy source _is_ more efficient for "human brain
| scale computation", it's just that nature didn't evolve that
| way...
| le_stoph wrote:
| > And the final kicker: the human brain runs on like two dozen
| Watts. An LLM takes a year of running on a few MW to train and
| several KW to run.
|
| I mean, you _could_ argue that if you take into consideration
| all the generations (starting from the first amoeba) that it
| took to get to a standard human brain today, then the total
| energy used to "train" that brain is far greater. But I get
| your point and I do agree with you that our current hardware
| paradigm is probably not what's going to give us "god in a
| box".
| brandensilva wrote:
| Quantum compute is my guess. Being able to switch entire models
| at atomic speeds will give the perception of intelligence at
| least. There is still a lot there that will need to be figured
| out between now and then.
| simonw wrote:
| Thanks to that weird Elon Musk story TIL that Deep Mind's Denis
| Hassabis started his career in game development working at
| Lionhead as lead AI programmer on Black & White!
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demis_Hassabis
| lo_zamoyski wrote:
| It's intellectual charlatanism or incompetence.
|
| In the former case (charlatanism), it's basically marketing.
| Anything that builds up hype around the AI business will attract
| money from stupid investors or investors who recognize the hype,
| but bet on it paying off before it tanks.
|
| In the latter case (incompetence), many people honestly don't
| know what it means to _know_ something. They spend their entire
| lives this way. They honestly think that words like "emergence"
| bless intellectually vacuous and uninformed fascinations with the
| aura of Science!(tm). These kinds of people lack a true grasp of
| even basic notions like "language", an analysis of which already
| demonstrates the silliness of AI-as-intelligence.
|
| Now, that doesn't mean that in the course of foolish pursuit,
| some useful or good things might not fall out as a side effect.
| That's no reason to pursue foolish things, but the point is that
| the presence of some accidental good fruits doesn't prove the
| legitimacy of the whole. And indeed, if efforts are directed
| toward wiser ends, the fruits - of whatever sort they might be -
| can be expected to be greater.
|
| Talk of AGI is, frankly, just annoying and dumb, at least when it
| is used to mean bona fide intelligence or "superintelligence".
| Just hold your nose and take whatever gold there is in Egypt.
| rjzzleep wrote:
| To some extent the culture that spawned out of Silicon Valley VC
| pitch culture made it so that realistic engineers are
| automatically brushed aside as too negative. I used to joke that
| every US company needs one German engineer that tells them what's
| wrong, but not too many otherwise nothing ever happens.
| esafak wrote:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A-b7-fLOjlY
| wongarsu wrote:
| The article is well worth reading. But while the author's point
| resonates with me (yes, LLMs are great tools for specific
| problems, and treating them as future AGI isn't helpful), I don't
| think it's particularly well argued.
|
| Yes, the huge expected value argument is basically just Pascal's
| wager, there is a cost on the environment, and OpenAI doesn't
| take good care of their human moderators. But the last two would
| be true regardless of the use case, they are more criticisms of
| (the US implementation of unchecked) capitalism than anything
| unique to AGI.
|
| And as the author also argues very well, solving today's problems
| isn't why OpenAI was founded. As a private company they are free
| to pursue any (legal) goal. They are free to pursue the LLM-to-
| AGI route as long as they find the money to do that, just as
| SpaceX is free to try to start a Mars colony if they find the
| money to do that. There are enough other players in the space
| focused in the here and now. Those just don't manage to inspire
| as well as those with huge ambitions and consequently are much
| less prominent in public discourse
| mofeien wrote:
| > As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by
| bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with
| minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).
|
| > LLMs-as-AGI fail on all three fronts. The computational
| profligacy of LLMs-as-AGI is dissatisfying, and the exploitation
| of data workers and the environment unacceptable.
|
| It's a bit unsatisfying how the last paragraph only argues
| against the second and third points, but is missing an
| explanation on how LLMs fail at the first goal as was claimed. As
| far as I can tell, they are already quite effective and correct
| at what they do and will only get better with no skill ceiling in
| sight.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| do you find a 40-60% failure rate fits your definition of
| correctness? I don't think they really needed to spell this
| failure out...
|
| https://www.salesforce.com/blog/why-generic-llm-agents-fall-...
| skywhopper wrote:
| They are not "correct" most of the time in my experience. I
| assumed the author left that "proof" out because it was
| obvious.
| killerstorm wrote:
| On the other hand we have DeepMind / Demis Hassabis, delivering:
|
| * AlphaFold - SotA protein folding
|
| * AlphaEvolve + other stuff accelerating research mathematics:
| https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.02864
|
| * "An AI system to help scientists write expert-level empirical
| software" - demonstrating SotA results for many kinds of
| scientific software
|
| So what's the "fantasy" here, the actual lab delivering results
| or a sob story about "data workers" and water?
| hagbarth wrote:
| I believe AlphaFold, AlphaEvolve etc are _not_ looking to get
| to AGI. The whole article is a case against AGI chasing, not ML
| or LLM overall.
| killerstorm wrote:
| AlphaEvolve is a general system which works in many domains.
| How is that not a step towards general intelligence?
|
| And it is effectively a loop around LLM.
|
| But my point is that we have evidence that Demis Hassabis
| knows his shit. Just doubting him on a general vibe is not
| smart
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| AlphaEvolve is a system for evolving symbolic computer
| programs.
|
| Not everything that DeepMind works on (such as AlphaGo,
| AlphaFold) are directly, or even indirectly, part of a push
| towards AGI. They seem to genuinely want to accelerate
| scientific research, and for Hassabis personally this seems
| to be his primary goal, and might have remained his only
| goal if Google hadn't merged Google Brain with DeepMind and
| forced more of a product/profit focus.
|
| DeepMind do appear to be defining, and approaching, "AGI"
| differently that the rest of the pack who are LLM-scaling
| true believers, but exactly what their vision is for an AGI
| architecture, at varying timescales, remains to be seen.
| Apocryphon wrote:
| Has he, his team, or DeepMind used any AGI rhetoric, even
| just as advertising?
| SalmoShalazar wrote:
| I'm not sure you understand what AGI is given the citations
| you've provided.
| killerstorm wrote:
| > "While AlphaEvolve is currently being applied across math
| and computing, its *general* nature means it can be applied
| to any problem whose solution can be described as an
| algorithm, and automatically verified. We believe AlphaEvolve
| could be transformative across many more areas such as
| material science, drug discovery, sustainability and wider
| technological and business applications."
|
| Is that not general enough for you? or not intelligent?
|
| Do you imagine AGI as a robot and not as datacenter solving
| all kinds of problems?
| Jensson wrote:
| > Do you imagine AGI as a robot and not as datacenter
| solving all kinds of problems?
|
| AGI means it can replace basically all human white collar
| work, alpha evolve can't do that while average humans can.
| White collar work is mostly done by average humans after
| all, if average humans can learn that then so should an
| AGI.
|
| An easier test is that the AGI must be able to beat most
| computer games without being trained on those games,
| average humans can beat most computer games without anyone
| telling them how to do it, they play and learn until they
| beat it 40 hours later.
|
| AGI was always defined as an AI that could do what typical
| humans can do, like learn a new domain to become a
| professional or play and beat most video games etc. If the
| AI can't study to become a professional then its not as
| smart or general as an average human, so unless it can
| replace most professionals its not an AGI because you can
| train a human of average intelligence to become a
| professional in most domains.
| killerstorm wrote:
| AlphaEvolve demonstrates that Google can build a system
| which can be trained to do very challenging intelligent
| tasks (e.g. research-level math).
|
| Isn't it just an optimization problem from this point?
| E.g. now training take a lot of hardware and time. If
| they make it so efficient that training can happen in
| matter of minutes and cost only few dollars, won't it
| satisfy your criterion?
|
| I'm not saying AlphaEvolve is "AGI", but it looks odd to
| deny it's a step towards AGI.
| tatjam wrote:
| I think most people would agree that AlphaEvolve is not
| AGI, but any AGI system must be a bit like AlphaEvolve,
| in the sense that it must be able to iteratively interact
| with an external system towards some sort of goal stated
| both abstractly and using some metrics.
|
| I like to think that the fundamental difference between
| AlphaEvolve and your typical genetic / optimization
| algorithms is the ability to work with the context of its
| goal in an abstract manner instead of just the
| derivatives of the cost function against the inputs, thus
| being able to tackle problems with mind-boggling
| dimensionality.
| jimbokun wrote:
| The "context window" seems to be a fundamental blocker
| preventing LLMs from replacing a white collar worker
| without some fundamental break through to solve it.
| killerstorm wrote:
| It's to early to declare something "fundamental blocker"
| while there's so much ongoing research.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Isn't the point that DeepMind is producing products providing
| value to humanity, where AGI looks like something that will
| produce mainly harm?
| per1 wrote:
| Hao is not just a "ai is bad" book... Those exist but Hao is a
| highly credited journalist.
| HarHarVeryFunny wrote:
| Yeah, in reality it seems that DeepMind are more the good guys,
| at least in comparison to the others.
|
| You can argue about whether the pursuit of "AGI" (however you
| care to define it) is a positive for society, or even whether
| LLMs are, but the AI companies are all pursuing this, so that
| doesn't set them apart.
|
| What makes DeepMind different is that they are at least also
| trying to use AI/ML for things like AlphaFold that are a
| positive, and Hassabis' appears genuinely passionate about the
| use of AI/ML to accelerate scientific research.
|
| It seems that some of the other AI companies are now belatedly
| trying to at least appear to be interested in scientific
| research, but whether this is just PR posturing or something
| they will dedicate substantial resources to, and be successful
| at, remains to be seen. It's hard to see OpenAI, planning to
| release SexChatGPT, as being sincerely committed to anything
| other than making themselves a huge pile of money.
| tleyden5iwx wrote:
| AGI will happen, but we need to start reverse engineering the
| brain. IMHO LeCun and Hawkins have it right, even though the
| results are still pretty non-existent.
|
| In the meantime, 100% agree, it's complete fantastical nonsense.
| csomar wrote:
| What is funny is that when asked, the current LLMs/AIs, do not
| believe in an AGI. Here are the some of readings you can do about
| the AGI fantasy:
|
| - Godel-style incompleteness and the "stability paradox"
|
| - Wolfram's principle - Principle of Computational Equivalence
| (PCE)
|
| One of the red flags is human intelligence/brain itself. We have
| way more neurons than we are currently using. The limit to
| intelligence might very possibly be mathematical and adding
| neurons/transistors will not result in incremental intelligence.
|
| The current LLMs will prove useful but since the models are out
| there, if this is a maxima, the ROI will be exactly 0.
| dist-epoch wrote:
| The human brain existing is proof that "Godel-style
| incompleteness" and "Wolfram's principle" are not barriers to
| AGI.
| AndrewKemendo wrote:
| Go read Kurzweil or Bostrom or Shannon or von neumman or minsky
| or etc... and you'll realize how little you have thought of any
| of these problems/issues and there are literally millions of
| words spilled already decades before your "new concerns." The
| alignment problem book predates GPT2 so give me a break.
|
| People have been shitting on AGI since the term was invented by
| Ben Goertzel.
|
| Anyone (like me) who has been around AGI longer than a few years
| is going to continue to keep our heads down and keep working. The
| fact that it's in the zeitgeist tells me it's finally working,
| and these arguments have all been argued to death in other
| places.
|
| Yet we're making regular progress towards it no matter what you
| want to think or believe
|
| The measurable reality of machine dominance in actuation of
| physical labor is accelerating unabated.
| lordleft wrote:
| The language around AGI is proof, in my mind, that religious
| impulses don't die with the withering of religion. A desire for a
| totalizing solution to all woes still endures.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| People always create god, even if they claim not to believe in
| it. The rise of belief in conspiracy theories is a form of this
| (imagining an all powerful entity behind every random event),
| as is the belief in AGI. It's not a totalizing solution to all
| woes. It's just a way to convince oneself that the world is not
| random, and is therefore predictable, which makes us feel
| safer. That, after all, is what we are - prediction machines.
| danielbln wrote:
| The existential dread from uncertainty is so easily exploited
| too, and the root cause for many of societies woes. I wonder
| what the antidote is, or if there is one.
| casey2 wrote:
| It's just a scam, plain and simple. Some scams can go on for
| a very long time if you let the scammers run society.
|
| Any technically superior solution needs to have a built in
| scam otherwise most followers will ignore it and the scammers
| won't have incentive to prosthelytize, e.g. rusts' safety
| scam.
| red75prime wrote:
| Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of the
| sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations? Those
| situations are close in other aspects too: we have a physical
| system (the sun, the brain), whose functionality we try to
| replicate technologically.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| the way the pro nuclear crowd talk you might think they are a
| persecuted religion actually
| red75prime wrote:
| Or over-the-top proponents of clean intermittent energy
| sources. Mountains of batteries and lakes of pumped storage
| for the Sun and Wind god.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You don't even have to go as far as fusion reactors. Nuclear
| bombs are real, and we know they work.
|
| But surely, anyone who's talking about atomic weapons must be
| invoking religious imagery and the old myths of divine
| retribution! They can't be talking about an actual technology
| capable of vaporizing cities and burning people into the
| walls as shadows - what a ridiculous, impossible notion would
| that be! "World War 3" is just a good old end-of-the-world
| myth, the kind of myth that exists in many religions, but
| given a new coat of paint.
|
| And Hiroshima and Nagasaki? It's the story of Sodom and
| Gomorrah, now retold for the new age. You have to be a
| doomsday cultist to believe that something like this could
| actually happen!
| marcosdumay wrote:
| > Does language around fusion reactors ("bringing power of
| the sun to Earth" and the like) cause similar associations?
|
| Yes. And the people talking about "bringing the power of the
| Sun to Earth" are usually either full of shit or expect so
| little from their audience that they are effectively talking
| shit (or are making clickbait, what's the same). (And yes,
| there's a lot of fraud around fusion too.)
|
| The people doing actual work don't use phrases like that in
| normal conversation.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I'm an atheist too. I grew up in the church, rejected it in my
| teens. The problem with organized religion was the "organized"
| part -- the centralized, inflexible human authority.
|
| I'm increasingly convinced that spirituality is a vital part of
| the human experience and we should embrace it, not reject it.
| If you try to banish basic human impulses, they just resurface
| in worse, unexpected forms somewhere else.
|
| We all need ways to find deep connection with other humans and
| the universe around us. We need basic moral principles to
| operate on. I think most atheists like myself have quietly
| found this or are in the process of finding this, but it's ok
| to say it out loud.
|
| For me it means meditation, frugality, and strict guidelines on
| how I treat others. That's like a religion, I guess. But that's
| OK. I embrace it. By owning it and naming it, you have mastery
| over it.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| Thanks for saying this. I have a similar situation: " I grew
| up in the church, rejected it in my teens."
|
| I've come to conclude that the problem isn't "religion" in
| the abstract, it's that the current institutions are
| unhealthy and sometimes toxic. IE, it's easier to be an
| atheist, _even in name only,_ when one realizes that the
| religion they participated in as a child has more problems
| than benefits.
|
| I sometimes wonder how people like us could create
| institutions that replace religions, yet generally agree with
| our beliefs and needs.
|
| ---
|
| BTW: I've seen plenty of toxic behavior from atheists too.
| Aggressive evangelizing ones' beliefs, (or lack thereof,) IMO
| is a toxic behavior.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > The problem with organized religion was the "organized"
| part
|
| What on earth is "unorganized" religion? How is such a
| concept distinct from the concepts of "worldview" or
| "ideology"? When people use the term, I assume automatically
| they're referring to abrahamic faiths--especially in contrast
| to "atheism".
| daerogami wrote:
| It just means a religion with a formal structure and
| leadership behind it. The term points to the institution
| and its influence, not the beliefs themselves. An
| unorganized religion is basically personal or informal
| practice without a central authority, like an individual or
| essentially a book club.
| MangoToupe wrote:
| > An unorganized religion is basically personal or
| informal practice without a central authority, like an
| individual or essentially a book club.
|
| Right, but I don't know what is referred to by "practice"
| that is at all distinct from "worldview" or "ideology".
| eks391 wrote:
| If the way you practice your religion is standardized by
| an authority across several churches, it is organized
| religion. For example: Catholic sects and Mormons are
| organized faiths. They have manuals for the priests to
| follow and you can go to the same one elsewhere and get
| mostly the same experience. Some small churches localized
| to a city are also organized. Islam sects in the Middle
| east are usually organized between Sunni and Shia. To my
| knowledge, Islam is not organized in the USA even though
| the Imam might align with a sect, because there is no
| authority they report to or strict standard for their
| patrons. Most Protestant churches are unorganized, and
| non-denominational are almost always unorganized because
| they are one-offs.
|
| This is my informal understanding; I am not a religious
| scholar
| asdfman123 wrote:
| I didn't say we need "unorganized religion," I said the
| problem with organization religion is the _organization_.
|
| We need more spirituality.
| ryeights wrote:
| This is an odd perspective to me. I'm an atheist because I
| don't find the truth claims of theistic religions convincing.
| Whether or not the centralized structure of modern religion
| is problematic is tangential to that
| tim333 wrote:
| I've seen more religious language from AGI skeptics than
| believers. I kind of think AGI will happen on the basis of
| being able to think / process data like a human brain which I
| don't see as unlikely. The skeptics will say AGI is trying to
| build god and so not happening, but that's a strawman argument
| really.
| svieira wrote:
| > The nineteenth century decided to have no religious
| authority. The twentieth century seems disposed to have any
| religious authority.
|
| An article in _Illustrated London News_ , April 26, 1924 by G.
| K. Chesterton
| pessimizer wrote:
| Emmanuel Todd has been going on about "zombie" and "zero"
| religion in a way that is really resonating with me.
|
| If I understand his idea correctly, these societies that were
| developed with a religious justification, and a huge religious
| component, are of course losing it in the scientific age. The
| first stage they go through is "zombie religion" where people
| don't pretend to believe in the religion any more, but still
| insist that they share all of its values, and often become even
| more fanatical in the functions that the old religion served.
| The second stage is "zero religion" where both the belief and
| the functions are gone, and all that's left is a religion
| shaped hole that is filled with nihilism: the strong preying on
| the weak, self-indulgence, and an elite retreat into often
| paranoid fantasy.
|
| These stages are shaped by the particular religion that
| disappeared, so the Zero Catholicisms aren't the same as Zero
| Protestantisms aren't the same as the Zero Islams. Science,
| being about what works rather than why you should be doing
| anything, simply didn't fill up these holes that once held
| _morality and justification._ For him, it seems, the Western
| world is primarily in a moral crisis, and we 're seeing it in
| the mental decay of an elite that doesn't have to justify
| itself to anyone, ever (after religion has died.)
|
| Personally, I can also see this in the deep desire of some
| people to _obey_ AI, but I can 't see it being fruitful at all.
| "Because the AI said so" is not particularly inspiring or
| ecstatic. It's just an extension of middle-class materialistic
| _money as grace_ and _job as devotion_ , which is notoriously
| unfulfilling. Will AI help you succeed if it can't tell you
| what it means to succeed?
| heresie-dabord wrote:
| The A.I. economic bubble is a mad scramble to ride the crest of
| a wave of stock-pumping expectations before the inevitable
| collapse and dump. Trillions of dollars of "value" from
| bloviating promises. It's worthy of a new chapter in Mackay's
| Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. [1]
|
| > religious impulses don't die with the withering of religion
|
| Religions have of course come and gone throughout human
| history. The preceding deities, temples, and artwork are called
| _mythology_ by people inside today 's temples of fervour.
|
| But let's be clear, disparate local tribal practices and
| beliefs are only formalised by a _power structure_ for the
| masked purposes of the _power structure_.
|
| What springs eternal is the maintenance of _control_ in
| political and tribal hierarchies.
|
| > A desire for a totalizing solution to all woes
|
| The fact that our species exhibits astonishing credulity is
| illustrated throughout history to the present day, not just in
| religious activities but in every context of economic scams and
| demagoguery.
|
| [1] _
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusion...
| jamesoofou wrote:
| i think a solution to all woes should be desired
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| We should do things because they are hard, not because they are
| cheap and easy. AGI might be a fantasy but there are lots of
| interesting problems that block the path to AGI that might get
| solved anyway. The past three years we've seen enormous progress
| with AI. Including a lot of progress in making this stuff a lot
| less expensive, more efficient, etc. You can now run some of this
| stuff on a phone and it isn't terrible.
|
| I think the climate impact of data centers is way overstated
| relative to the ginormous amounts of emissions from other
| sources. Yes it's not pretty but it's a fairly minor problem
| compared to people buying SUVs and burning their way through
| millions of tons of fuel per day to get their asses to work and
| back. Just a simple example. There are plenty.
|
| Data centers running on cheap clean power is entirely possible;
| and probably a lot cheaper long term. Kind of an obvious cost
| optimization to do. I'd prefer that to be sooner rather than
| later but it's nowhere near the highest priority thing to focus
| on when it comes to doing stuff about emissions.
| jimbokun wrote:
| In addition to being hard, we should ask if something is useful
| or if the benefits outweigh the harms.
|
| It's hard to see benefits from AI systems, AGI or otherwise. It
| doesn't seem to produce anything that improves human happiness
| or general well being.
| Marha01 wrote:
| I think you just lack imagination. I can imagine a lot of
| benefits of AGI or near-AGI systems.
| ares623 wrote:
| I agree. The benefits are just not well distributed.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The benefits of technology rarely are at first.
| didibus wrote:
| The issue is how you can also easily imagine a lot of
| negative.
|
| Neither those imagining positives or those imagining
| negatives can really prove to the other that they're right.
| This becomes the source of the conflict.
|
| If you predicted the negative outcomes, you'd also oppose
| it. If you believe the outcomes will be positive, you'd be
| a proponent.
|
| Now it also happens that a lot of those predicting positive
| outcomes are currently making money off the development of
| AI and so have an investment in its continued enablement.
| Which muddies things even more, because it's an obvious
| bias.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| > I think the climate impact of data centers is way overstated
| relative to the ginormous amounts of emissions from other
| sources. Yes it's not pretty but it's a fairly minor problem
| compared to people buying SUVs and burning their way through
| millions of tons of fuel per day to get their asses to work and
| back. Just a simple example. There are plenty.
|
| Oh no.
|
| AI data centers are sucking up so much power it's making
| everyone's electric bill go up.
|
| That's a tangible problem that dramatically impacts the poor
| and average person.
| pixl97 wrote:
| This is not a data center problem but a policy one of the
| last 20+ years.
|
| We have not been building and extending energy sources,
| instead from some time around 2000 we've been steady stating
| and increasing efficiency. That's perfectly fine, but if
| anything shows up and uses more power, that puts us in a
| losing game. We should have trashed our coal power plants
| forever ago, and looked at more things like nuclear and now
| solar and wind. Instead we are attempting to play catch up
| with a troglodyte foot on our face that is yelling 'burn more
| coal'.
|
| Don't blame data centers, instead blame politicians that
| would blame culture wars and the closest minority for the
| rest of our problems instead of actually working on public
| goods.
| mellosouls wrote:
| While I agree that the current LLM-based approaches won't get us
| to (sentient) AGI, I think this article is missing a key point:
| the entire modern AI revolution (while founded on research work
| esp coming from Google) was fired up by the AGI dreamers at
| OpenAI with GPT3+ then ChatGPT etc. They were first in industry;
| they created the field.
|
| Even if you don't expect them to get us over the final line, you
| should give them credit for that.
| random3 wrote:
| The lay misconception and wrongly attributed revolutions,
| discoveries, inventions is so common it has a name - Stigler's
| law of eponymy.
|
| You confound the AI product with the AI revolution.
| mellosouls wrote:
| You confound my point with some other of your own misreading.
|
| To repeat: The claim of the article is clearly incorrect.
| It's precisely the AGI "fantasists" that have engineered the
| incredible technological landscape we now live in.
|
| If you disagree, it would be useful to frame your argument in
| a clearer and less condescending fashion.
| alyxya wrote:
| > Briefly, the argument goes that if there is a 0.001% chance of
| AGI delivering an extremely large amount of value, and 99.999%
| chance of much less or zero value, then the EV is still extremely
| large because (0.001% * very_large_value) + (99.999% *
| small_value) = very_large_value
|
| I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main perspective
| I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a compounding
| multiplier on productivity, and this trend seems likely to
| continue at least in the near future considering how much better
| coding models are at boosting productivity now compared to last
| year.
| buellerbueller wrote:
| "The argument" ignores the opportunity cost of the other
| potential uses of the invested resources.
| kalkin wrote:
| Right. Nobody makes a Pascal's wager-style argument in _favor_
| of investing in AGI. People have sometimes made one against
| building AGI, on existential risk grounds. The OP author is
| about as confused on this as the water usage point... But the
| appetite for arguments against AI (which has legitimate
| motivations!) is so high that people are willing to drop any
| critical thinking.
| wmf wrote:
| People have definitely made the argument that every day AGI
| is delayed, people are dying from things AGI could have cured
| etc.
| kalkin wrote:
| That's not Pascal's Wager unless they're saying AGI has
| infinitesimal probability but infinite payoff, or something
| like that. If they think AGI is likely, they may be wrong
| but it's just technological optimism.
| tech_ken wrote:
| > I haven't heard of that being the argument. The main
| perspective I'm aware of is that more powerful AI models have a
| compounding multiplier on productivity, and this trend seems
| likely to continue at least in the near future considering how
| much better coding models are at boosting productivity now
| compared to last year.
|
| This is the new line now that LLMs are being commoditized, but
| in the post-Slate Star Codex AI/Tech Accelerationist era of
| like '20-'23 the Pascal's wager argument was very much a thing.
| In my experience it's kind of the "true believer" argument,
| whereas the ROI/productivity thing is the "I'm in it for the
| bag" argument.
| sota_pop wrote:
| So hysterical levels of investment still comes back to the Kelly
| Criterion... at the risk of sounding apophenic; the influence
| Bell Labs continues to have on our world amazes me more every
| day.
| baggachipz wrote:
| Keeping up the ruse is the only way to justify the sunk cost in
| _major_ investment.
| austy69 wrote:
| > As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by
| bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with
| minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).
|
| I agree with the first two points, but as others have commented
| the environmental claim here is just not compelling. Starting up
| your computer is technically creating environmental waste. By his
| metrics solving technical problems ethically is impossible.
| lkey wrote:
| Perfect harmlessness is impossible. Thus, we cannot
| differentiate between harms, nor should we try. This a stupid
| thing to profess and I do not believe you would defend it if
| pressed.
| austy69 wrote:
| I appreciate your thoughtful reply; I guess I would like more
| elaboration from the author on what constitutes ethical
| technology.
| wmf wrote:
| As long as you use the most efficient computer (Apple M5 natch)
| then you're causing minimal waste.
| t43562 wrote:
| It's probably unethical to solve a problem you could do
| yourself in 5 minutes at the energy cost of a packet of crisps
| by using.....lets say....a kilogram of coal. Or two kilos or
| whatever. But you can't see the cost so it seems free. You
| might see the money but we haven't linked this to environmental
| cost yet.
| yalogin wrote:
| AGI fantasy is really about hype and maintaining that aura around
| the company. It's to get clout and have people listen. This is
| what makes company's valuation shoot up to a trillion dollars.
| IAmGraydon wrote:
| >...Musk would regularly characterise Hassabis as a supervillain
| who needed to be stopped. Musk would make unequivocally clear
| that OpenAI was the good to DeepMind's evil. ... "He literally
| made a video game where an evil genius tries to create AI to take
| over the world," Musk shouted [at an OpenAI off-site], referring
| to Hassabis's 2004 title Evil Genius, "and fucking people don't
| see it. Fucking people don't see it! And Larry [Page]? Larry
| thinks he controls Demis but he's too busy fucking windsurfing to
| realize that Demis is gathering the power."
|
| There are some deeply mentally ill people out there, and given
| enough influence, their delusions seem to spread like a virus,
| infecting others and becoming a true mass delusion. Musk is not
| well, as he has repeatedly shown us. It amazes me that so many
| other people seem to be susceptible to the delusion, though.
| pissmeself wrote:
| Baker act these people.
| dwroberts wrote:
| I think there's a jealousy angle to Musk's need to characterise
| Hassabis as evil. The guy is actually legitimately smart, and
| clearly has an endgame (esp medicine and pharmaceuticals) and
| Musk is just role playing.
|
| I would love to have witnessed them meeting in person, as I
| assume must have happened at some point when DM was opened to
| being purchased. I bet Musk made an absolute fool of himself
| dinobones wrote:
| Thought this was going to be a good article then the author
| started mentioning water consumption and I stopped reading.
| mikemarsh wrote:
| The idea of replicating a consciousness/intelligence in a
| computer seems to fall apart even under materialist/atheist
| assumptions: what we experience as consciousness is a product of
| a vast number of biological systems, not just neurons firing or
| words spoken/thought. Even considering something as basic as how
| fundamental bodily movement is to mental development, or how
| hormones influence mood ultimately influencing thought, how could
| anyone ever hope to to replicate such things via software in a
| way that "clicks" to add up to consciousness?
| kalkin wrote:
| Conflating consciousness and intelligence is going to
| hopelessly confuse any attempt to understand if or when a
| machine might achieve either.
|
| (I think there's no reasonable definition of intelligence under
| which LLMs don't possess some, setting aside arguments about
| quantity. Whether they have or in principle could have any form
| of consciousness is much more mysterious -- how would we tell?)
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Defining machine consciousness is indeed mysterious, at the
| end of the day it ultimately depends on how much faith one
| puts in science fiction rather than an objective measure.
| kalkin wrote:
| Seems like a philosophy question, with maybe some input
| from neuroscience and ML interpretability. I'm not sure
| what faith in science fiction has to do with it.
| danielbln wrote:
| I don't see a strong argument here. Are you saying there is a
| level of complexity involved in biological systems that can not
| be simulated? And if so, who says sufficient approximations and
| abstractions aren't enough to simulate the emergent behavior of
| said systems?
|
| We can simulate weather (poorly) without modeling every
| hydrogen atom interaction.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| I guess it depends, can you tell the difference between a
| weather simulation and the actual world?
| ACCount37 wrote:
| Can you?
|
| You have weather readouts. One set is from a weather
| simulation - a simulated planet with simulated climate.
| Another is real recordings from the same place at the same
| planet, taken by real weather monitoring probes. They have
| the same starting point, but diverge over time.
|
| Which one is real though? Would you be able tell?
| mikemarsh wrote:
| They're not asking about telling the difference in
| collected data sets, data sets aren't weather.
|
| The question is can you tell the difference between the
| rain you see outside your window, and some representation
| of a simulated environment where the computer says "It's
| raining here in this simulated environment". The implied
| answer is of course, one is water falling from the sky
| and one is a machine.
| ACCount37 wrote:
| You can't look at the "real weather" though. You can only
| look at the outputs. That's the constraint. Good luck and
| have fun.
|
| A human brain is a big pile of jellied meat spread. An
| LLM is a big pile of weights strung together by matrix
| math. Neither looks "intelligent". Neither is
| interpretable. The most reliable way we have to compare
| the two is by comparing the outputs.
|
| You can't drill a hole in one of those and see something
| that makes you go "oh, it's this one, this one is the
| Real Intelligence, the other is fake". No easy out for
| you. You'll have to do it the hard way.
| hitarpetar wrote:
| there is no "real weather". the rain _is_ the weather.
| the map is not the territory. these are very simple
| concepts, idk why we need to reevaluate them because we
| all of a sudden got really good at text synthesis
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Everyone's a practical empiricist until our cherished
| science fiction worldview is called into question, then
| all of a sudden it's radical skepticism and "How can
| anyone really know anything, man?"
| mikemarsh wrote:
| Even granting all of your unfounded assertions; "the
| output" of one is the rain you see outside, "the output"
| of the other is a series of notches on a hard drive (or
| the SSD equivalent, or something in RAM, etc.) that's
| then represented by pixels on a screen.
|
| The difference between those two things (water and a
| computer) is plain, unless we want to depart into the
| territory of questioning whether that perception is
| accurate (after all, what "output" led us to believe that
| "jellied meat spread" can really "perceive" anything?),
| but then "the output" ceases to be any kind of meaningful
| measure at all.
| HDThoreaun wrote:
| You experience everything through digital signals. I dont
| see why those same signals cant be simulated. You are
| only experiencing the signal your skin sends to tell you
| there is rain, you dont actually need skin to experience
| that signal.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >The implied answer is of course, one is water falling
| from the sky and one is a machine.
|
| Lets say you're in a room a good distance from the
| window. Suddenly you hear what sounds like thunder and
| rain falling. From a distance it appears that it's
| raining outside.
|
| Is the rain real? Or is it simulated on a screen well
| enough you can't tell?
|
| You have input output devices just like a computer. They
| don't see reality, they filter out huge amounts of data
| and your brain just interprets it. If our machines get
| good enough we may be able to blast signals directly to
| the brain that say it's raining and the brain wouldn't
| have any idea if it was simulated or not. Much in the
| same way it feels like we exist and not a 3d hologram an
| infinite distance away (or whatever other weirdness
| physics may or could do).
| mikemarsh wrote:
| So how do we get from "machines may get really good at
| faking things to human perception" to "machines
| themselves can have human-like (or 'better') perception"?
|
| The question is so-called consciousness arising out of
| machines, not machines deceiving human consciousness.
|
| Even then, that deception still doesn't prove equivalency
| of simulated and real things, unless we're adopting an
| extreme and self-contradictory subjectivist epistemology.
| mikemarsh wrote:
| The argument is about causation or generation, not
| simulation. Of course we can simulate just about anything, I
| could write a program that just prints "Hello, I'm a
| conscious being!" instead of "Hello, World!".
|
| The weather example is a good one: you can run a program that
| simulates the weather in the same way my program above (and
| LLMs in general) simulate consciousness, but no one would say
| the program is _causing_ weather in any sense.
|
| Of course, it's entirely possible that more and more people
| will be convinced AI is generating consciousness, especially
| when tricks like voice or video chat with the models are
| employed, but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually
| conscious in the same way a human body empirically already
| is.
| pixl97 wrote:
| >but that doesn't mean that the machine is actually
| conscious in the same way a human body empirically
|
| Does it matter? Is a dog/cow/bird/lizard conscious in the
| same way a human is? We're built from the same basic parts,
| and yet humans seem to have a higher state of consciousness
| than other animals around us.
|
| For example the definition of the word conscious is
|
| >aware of and responding to one's surroundings; awake.
|
| I'll give that we likely mean this in a general sense, but
| I'd say we're pretty close to this with machines. They can
| observe the real world with sensors of different types, and
| then either directly compute, or use neural nets to make
| generalized decisions on what is occurring around them,
| then proceed to act on those observations.
| jimbokun wrote:
| If you simulate rainy weather, does anything get wet?
|
| (Not my original quote, but can't remember right now where I
| read it.)
|
| It's similar asking about whether silicon computers
| performing intelligent tasks is "conscious".
| energy123 wrote:
| Bundling up consciousness with intelligence is a big
| assumption, as is the assumption that panpsychism is incorrect.
| You may be right on both counts, but you can't just make those
| two assumptions as a foregone conclusion.
| jimbokun wrote:
| AGI won't replicate our experience.
|
| But it could be more powerful than us.
| pixl97 wrote:
| Honestly replicating our experience would be rather wasteful.
| Much like making planes the same way birds work to carry
| cargo.
| travisgriggs wrote:
| > As a technologist I want to solve problems effectively (by
| bringing about the desired, correct result), efficiently (with
| minimal waste) and without harm (to people or the environment).
|
| Me too. But, I worry this "want" may not be realistic/scalable.
|
| Yesterday, I was trying to get some Bluetooth/BLE working on a
| Raspberry CM 4. I had dabbled with this 9 months ago. And things
| were making progress then just fine. Suddenly with a new trixie
| build and who knows what else has changed, I just could not get
| my little client to open the HCI socket. In about 10 minutes
| prompt dueling between GPT and Claude, I was able to learn all
| about rfkill and get to the bottom of things. I've worked with
| Linux for 20+ years, and somehow had missed learning about rfkill
| in the mix.
|
| I was happy and saddened. I would not have k own where to turn.
| SO doesn't get near the traffic it used to and is so bifurcated
| and policed I don't even try anymore. I never know whether to
| look for a mailing list, a forum, a discord, a channel, the
| newsgroups have all long died away. There is no solidly written
| chapter in a canonically accepted manual written by tech writers
| on all things Bluetooth for the Linux Kernel packaged with
| raspbian. And to pile on, my attention span driven by a constant
| diet of engagement, makes it harder to have the patience.
|
| It's as if we've made technology so complex, that the only way
| forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs and the
| associated AGI fantasy.
| wilkommen wrote:
| In the short term, it may be unrealistic (as you illustrate in
| your story) to try to successfully navigate the increasingly
| fragmented, fragile, and overly complex technological world we
| have created without genAI's assistance. But in the medium to
| long term, I have a hard time seeing how a world that's so
| complex that we can't navigate it without genAI can survive.
| Someday our cars will once again have to be simple enough that
| people of average intelligence can understand and fix them. I
| believe that a society that relies so much on expertise (even
| for everyday things) that even the experts can't manage without
| genAI is too fragile to last long. It can't withstand shocks.
| jgilias wrote:
| I do agree with the fragility argument. Though if/when the
| shock comes, I doubt we'll be anywhere near being able to
| build cars. Especially taking into account that all the
| easily accessible ore has long been mined and oxidized away.
| titzer wrote:
| While I generally agree with this, I have mixed feelings. On
| the one hand, AI could be smart enough to reach the
| "enlightened master engineer" and can reach super-human
| levels of...simplification. In some ways, complexity can
| result from improper layering and abstraction inversion. It
| takes a holistic view to realize that the lines (i.e.
| interfaces) between layers were drawn improperly and redesign
| everything together, achieving an overall simplification.
|
| A good example is the web platform. It's just enormous...to
| the point that no human can really understand how it all even
| works. And I say that as someone who worked for a long time
| on a narrow part of that stack (V8). It being only a little
| over a million lines of code, it is incredibly intricate and
| subtle, because it implements a pretty weird language, has
| lots of optimizations, advanced GC, multiple compilers, etc.
| And that's just the JS engine. Add in the layout engine,
| rendering engine, multi-process architecture...it's beyond
| the comprehension a single mind.
|
| We're not yet at the level that an AI can understand code
| really _deeply_ yet, but may we will reach the point where an
| AI understands enough of it and can code competently enough
| to start over from scratch and build something we can both
| understand and does the things we _actually_ want it to do.
| FattiMei wrote:
| Yeah, using LLMs makes me reconsider the complexity of the
| software I'm producing and I'm relying on. In a sense LLMs can
| be a test for the complexity and the fast iteration cycles
| could yield better solutions than the existing ones
| saint_yossarian wrote:
| Distros do have manuals, they just usually come in the form of
| user-curated wikis these days. ArchWiki is usually my first
| stop when I run into a Linux issue, even as a fellow Debian
| user.
|
| Both https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Bluetooth and
| https://wiki.debian.org/BluetoothUser mention rfkill and show
| you how to troubleshoot.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| > It's as if we've made technology so complex, that the only
| way forward is to double down and try harder with these LLMs
| and the associated AGI fantasy.
|
| This is the real AI risk we should be worried about IMO, at
| least short term. Information technology has made things vastly
| more complicated. AI will make it even more incomprehensible.
| Tax code, engineering, car design, whatever.
|
| It's already happening at my work. I work at big tech and we
| already have a vast array of overly complicated tools/technical
| debt no one wants to clean up. There's several initiatives to
| use AI to prompt an agent, which in turn will find the right
| tool to use and run the commands.
|
| It's not inconceivable that 10 or 20 years down the road no
| human will bother trying to understand what's actually going
| on. Our brains will become weaker and the logic will become
| vastly more complicated.
| jimbokun wrote:
| Has anyone tried putting the AIs to work cleaning up the
| technical debt?
| asdfman123 wrote:
| Yes, I'm already doing it. But the problem is there's not a
| lot of incentive from management to do it.
|
| Long term investment in something that can't easily be
| quantified is a non-starter to management. People will say
| "thank you for doing that" but those who create new
| features that drive metrics get promoted.
| iamflimflam1 wrote:
| I see this too. The focus on "believable ROI" makes it
| very hard to do.
| jimbokun wrote:
| That's why it's very important to work for an
| organization run by engineers or former engineers when
| writing software.
|
| And engineers who actually shipped and maintained
| successful products over time.
|
| For software developed in-house by non-software
| organizations, the incentives are all wrong because
| management cannot properly assess the value of well
| architected systems.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| That's true of smaller orgs -- ones that can't afford to
| pay for nonsense 5-10 years down the road.
|
| Big tech _can_ afford to pay for all kinds of nonsense.
| jimbokun wrote:
| I think LLMs as a replacement for Google, Stack Overflow, etc.
| is a no brainer. As long as you can get to the source documents
| when you need them, and train yourself to sniff out
| hallucinations.
|
| (We already do this constantly in categorizing human generated
| bullshit information and useful information constantly. So
| learning to do something similar with LLM output is not
| necessarily worse, just different.)
|
| What's silly at this point is replacing a human entirely with
| an LLM. LLMs are still fundamentally unsuited for those tasks,
| although they may be in the future with some significant break
| throughs.
| gwbas1c wrote:
| The LLMs we have today aren't a fantasy: They're a concrete
| thing that works.
|
| Just because the people who make them live in a fantasy world,
| doesn't mean we can't reap the fruits of their labor!
|
| That being said, I suspect a lot of the energy spent on AI
| training is resulting in unusable slop.
| teeray wrote:
| Where is all the moral outrage that completely stonewalled
| technologies like human cloning? For what most businesses want
| out of AGI, it's tantamount to having digital slaves.
| yellow_postit wrote:
| Likely because (very?) few would associate LLMs in their
| current form with "digital slaves". Attributing personhood to a
| non-corporeal entity is likely a multi-generational change, if
| it ever happens.
| macleginn wrote:
| I think he got it backwards. Whisper, incredible things chatbots
| can do with machine translation and controlled text generation,
| unbelievably useful code-generation capabilities (if enjoyed
| responsibly), new heights in general and scientific question
| answering, etc. AI as a set of tools is just great already, and
| users have access to it at a very low cost because these people
| passionately believe in weirdly improbable scenarious and their
| belief is infectious enough for some other people to give them
| enough money for capex and for yet other people to work 996 if
| not worse to push their models forward.
|
| To put it another way, there were many talented people and lots
| of compute already before the AI craze really took off in early
| 2020s, and tell me, what magical things were they doing instead?
| dmix wrote:
| I always found it funny OpenAI staff tried to delay the release
| of GPT to the world because they feared the consequences of
| giving the public such a power. Hearing stuff like this makes it
| even funnier:
|
| > In the pit, [Sutskever] had placed a wooden effigy that he'd
| commissioned from a local artist, and began a dramatic
| performance. This effigy, he explained represented a good,
| aligned AGI that OpenAI had built, only to discover it was
| actually lying and deceitful. OpenAI's duty, he said, was to
| destroy it. ... Sutskever doused the effigy in lighter fluid and
| lit on fire.
|
| Sutskever was one the people behind the coup of Sam Altman over
| AI safety concerns. He also said this in 2022:
|
| > "It may be that today's large neural networks are slightly
| conscious." [1]
|
| A good question is are these AI safety proponents a bit loony or
| do they actually believe this stuff. Maybe it's both.
|
| [1] https://futurism.com/the-byte/openai-already-sentient
| ACCount37 wrote:
| We don't know enough about consciousness to be able to
| conclusively confirm or deny that LLMs are conscious.
|
| Claiming otherwise is overconfident stupidity. Of which there
| is no shortage of that in AI space.
| dmix wrote:
| That's the sort of convenient framing that lets you get away
| with hand wavy statements which the public eats up, like
| calling LLM development 'superintelligence'.
|
| It's good for a conversation starter on Twitter or a pitch
| deck, but there is real measurable technology they are
| producing and it's pretty clear what it is and what it isn't.
|
| In 2021 they were already discussing these safety ideas in a
| grandiose way, when all they had was basic lego building
| blocks (GPT 1). This isn't just a thought experiment to them.
| bibimsz wrote:
| Actual engineering is happening. Every great innovation is
| fantasy until it's real. What would you rather the money be spent
| on and why should anyone care? You can call any paid work
| exploitation if you want to.
| xixixao wrote:
| > But AGI arguments based on EV are nonsensical because the
| values and probabilities are made up and unfalsifiable.
|
| Hmm, so most businesses behave nonsensically, because they
| estimate future outcomes...
|
| I'm not disputing the conclusion, but this crucial argument
| doesn't seem very strong.
| zerotolerance wrote:
| It is such a pure thing when an engineer looks at the world and
| is surprised, frustrated, or disappointed at behavior at scale.
| This is a finance game which in itself is a storytelling / belief
| based system. It might seem like math, but when you're playing on
| the growth edges valuation is really is about the story you tell
| and the character of the players. Thats only worse when people
| stop caring about cashflows or only expect them to happen "in the
| future" because that makes it someone else's problem.
| amelius wrote:
| AI is also a blocker to art. Going to art school seems kind of
| pointless these days.
| theoldgreybeard wrote:
| AI is a blocker to the human experience.
| netdevphoenix wrote:
| How refreshing to see an AI realistic view on HN these days! As
| the author said, no one is claiming transformer tech useless, the
| issue is the relentless drive to claim loudly that transformers
| will lead to AGI in the next few years and solve all existing
| problems and that it is worth the current negative damage to
| society and the environment.
|
| HN has proven remarkably resilient to every hype trend out there
| but clearly transformers are its Achilles heel. That or/and
| massive transformer astroturfing
| brulard wrote:
| I did not get the sentiment here on HN that AGI is right behind
| the next corner.
| asdfman123 wrote:
| But it's a boon to gathering investment capital and talent.
|
| Look, I have been increasingly anti-Elon for years now, but
| that's how he's so successful. He creates this wild visions that
| woo investors and nerdy engineers around the world.
|
| That's the whole point. If his pitch was "we can create better
| chat bots" no one would care.
|
| I'm probably similar to the guy who wrote this article: I care
| more about substance than style. That doesn't get you ahead in
| this world, though. Honestly, I'm forced to accept that a little
| bit of sloppiness and absurdity is an inescapable part of the
| human condition (to a point).
| Nevermark wrote:
| I get the skepticism about the dramedy of burning future AGI in
| effigy. But given humans are always a dramady, I don't judge odd
| or hyperbolic behaviors too harshly from a distance.
|
| It's too easy to dismiss others' idiosyncrasies and miss the
| signal. And the story involves a successful and capable person
| communicating poetically about an area they have a track record
| in that probably the author of this article and most of us can't
| compete with.
|
| I am struck by any technical person that still thinks AGI is any
| kind of barrier, or what they expect the business plan of a
| leader in AI, with a global list of competitors, is supposed to
| look like?
|
| AGI is talked about like a bright line, but it's more a line of
| significance to us than any kind of technical barrier.
|
| This isn't writing. Although that changed everything.
|
| This isn't the printing press. Although that changed everything.
|
| This isn't the telegraph. Although that changed everything.
|
| This isn't the phonograph, radio communication, the Internet, web
| or mobile phones. Although those changed everything.
|
| This is intelligence. The meta technology of all technology.
|
| And intelligence is the part of the value chain that we currently
| earn a living at. In the biosphere. In the econosphere.
|
| The artificial kind is moving forward very fast, despite every
| delay seeming to impress people. "We haven't achieved X yet"
| isn't an argument at any time, but certainly not in the context
| of today's accelerated progress.
|
| It is moving forward faster than any single human, growing up
| from birth, ever has or ever will, if it helps to think of it
| that way.
|
| Nor is, "they haven't replaced us yet" an argument. We were
| always going to be replaced. We didn't repeal the laws of
| competition and adaptation "this time".
|
| Our species was never going to maintain supremacy after we
| unleashed technology's ability to accumulate capabilities faster
| than we or any biological machine could ever hope to evolve.
|
| It isn't even a race is it? How fast is the Human Bio
| Intelligence Enhancements Department going? Or the Human
| Intelligence Breeding Club? Not very fast I think.
|
| Very few AI die hards ever imagined we would be anywhere near
| this close to AGI today, in 2025, even five years ago, circa
| Ancient (i.e. January) 2020. There is a dose of singularity.
|
| Yet in retrospect, 99% of AI progress is attributable to faster
| and more transistors. Today's architectures fine tune algorithms
| that existed in the mid-1980's. Getting here was more about
| waiting for computer hardware to be ready than anything else.
| Current investments don't reflect that main driver stalling, but
| exploding.
|
| Once we have AGI, we will have already passed it. Or, more
| accurately, it will have passed us. Don't spend much time
| imagining a stable karmic world of parity. Other than as a
| historically nice trope for some fun science fiction where our
| continued supremacy made for good story. That's not what
| compounding progress looks like.
|
| Chaotically compounding progress has been the story of life. And
| then tech. It isn't going to suddenly stop for us.
|
| What an odd and transparently motivated thought.
| 1vuio0pswjnm7 wrote:
| "Reading Empire of AI by Karen Hao, I was struck by how people
| associated with OpenAI believe in AGI. They really do think
| someone, perhaps them, will build AGI, and that it will lead to
| either the flourishing or destruction of humanity."
|
| "I think it's remarkable that what was until recently sci-fi
| fantasy has become a mainstream view in Silicon Valley."
|
| I think the use of the term "believe" is remarkable
|
| According to the "AI experts" there are "believers" and
| "skeptics"
|
| Science fiction is exactly that: fiction
|
| For decades, software developers cannot stop using the word
| "magic", "magically", etc.
|
| Silicon Valley is a place for believers
|
| A place where promoters like Steve Jobs can, according to one
| Apple employee, distort reality^1
|
| 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reality_distortion_field
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P._T._Barnum
|
| Some people enjoy science fiction and fantasy. Others may not
| care for it. It's a matter of taste
| _jab wrote:
| One symptom of AGI fantasy that I particularly hate is the
| dismissal of applied AI companies as "wrappers" - as if they're
| not offering any real technical add on top of the models
| themselves.
|
| This seems to be a problem specific to AI. No one casts startups
| that build off of blockchains as thin, nor the many companies
| that were enabled by cloud computing and mobile computing as
| recklessly endangered by competition from the maintainers of
| those platforms.
|
| The reality is that applying AI to real challenges is an
| important and distinct problem space from just building AI models
| in the first place. And in my view, AI is in dire need of more
| investment in this space - a recent MIT study found that 95% of
| AI pilots at major organizations are ending in failure.
| noisy_boy wrote:
| Greedy managers are a blocker to actual engineering. It wasn't
| enough that they were trying to squeeze the last ounce of
| delivery via twisted implementations of Agile. Now they are
| shooting down every attempt to apply any amount of introspection
| and thought with blanket expectation of LLMs obviating any need
| to do so. That combined with random regurgitation of terms like
| "MCP" and "agentic" has made programming into a zombie-like
| experience of trying to coax the LLMs to produce something
| workable while fighting inflated expectations of the
| hallucinating bosses.
| tim333 wrote:
| >AGI fantasy...
|
| >I think it's remarkable that what was until recently sci-fi
| fantasy has become a mainstream view in Silicon Valley.
|
| Human like thinking by machines, which I think is what most
| people think of as AGI was not until recently a sci-fi fantasy.
|
| It was dealt with by Turning of Turing test fame and the main
| founder of computer science, around 1950 and the idea of
| singularity in the tech sense came from John von Neumann who was
| fundamental to the John von Neumann architecture used as the
| basis of much computing. If you assume the brain is a biological
| computer and electronic computers get better in a Moore's law
| like way then a crossover is kind of inevitable.
|
| Dismissing it as sci-fi fantasy seems a bit like dismissing a
| round as opposed to flat earth ideas in a similar way.
|
| Which doesn't mean that LLMs are the answer and we should stick
| all the money into them. That's a different thing.
| kragen wrote:
| > _I think it's remarkable that what was until recently sci-fi
| fantasy has become a mainstream view in Silicon Valley._
|
| I wonder if Tom Phillips isn't very familiar with the history of
| Silicon Valley, because this is the most unremarkable thing. 60
| years ago personal computers were sci-fi fantasy, and 50 years
| ago they were a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 50 years ago
| usable GUIs were sci-fi fantasy, and 40 years ago they were a
| mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 40 years ago a global computer
| network used by almost everyone was sci-fi fantasy, and 30 years
| ago it was a mainstream view in Silicon Valley. 30 years ago
| always-internet-connected wearable computing devices were sci-fi
| fantasy, and 20 years ago they were a mainstream view in Silicon
| Valley. 20 years ago renewable energy cheaper than coal was a
| sci-fi fantasy, and 10 years ago it was a mainstream view in
| Silicon Valley.
|
| There were a lot of other sci-fi fantasies that didn't pan out,
| of course, or at least haven't panned out yet, so this isn't a
| sign that AGI will definitely happen. Xanadu, the Information
| Superhighway, graphical programming, virtual reality, freedom,
| world peace, energy too cheap to meter, the full automation of
| production, flying cars, and so on. But the entire point of
| Silicon Valley is that it's a machine for turning sci-fi
| fantasies into the realities of everyday life.
| vatsachak wrote:
| Data centers are good because they are resource hogs that are
| designed by the some of the most technically gifted people in the
| US. This will hasten gains in water and energy availability
| tonetegeatinst wrote:
| Many arguments I see from people skeptical of AI or other
| revolutionary theory's seem to overlap.
|
| I'm confident the same arguments could have been used in the
| industrial revolution....the industry rapidly outgrowing the
| supply of energy, the overinvesting by people hoping they found a
| golden goose by being first to market etc.
| t43562 wrote:
| Why is AGI so hungry? Our brains learn on the fly and do amazing
| things and how much energy do they use?
|
| So IMO we certainly haven't hit the "right technology" yet and
| the attempt to achieve it by spending billions, building nuclear
| power plants etc, is vulnerable to a technical development. So
| why should we screw up our environmental situation for something
| that can obviously be done in a vastly better way on the energy
| equivalent of 3 square meals a day?
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