I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

On the plus side, the industry is rapidly moving towards locally-run AI models specifically because they don't want to purchase and run fleets of these absurd things or any other expensive hardware.

The tragic irony of the kind of misinformed article this is linking is that the server farms that would be running this stuff are fairly efficient. The water is reused and recycled, the heat is often used for other applications. Because wasting fewer resources is cheaper than wasting more resources.
But all those locally-run models on laptop CPUs and desktop GPUs? That's grid power being turned into heat and vented into a home (probably with air conditioning on).
The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.
I do hate our media landscape sometimes.
- But efficiency is not the only consideration, privacy and self reliance are important facets as well. Your argument about efficiënt computing is 100% valid but there is a lot more to it.
- The weird AI panic, driven by an attempt to repurpose the popular anti-crypto arguments whether they matched the new challenges or not, is going to PR this tech into wasting way more energy than it would otherwise by distributing it over billions of computer devices paid by individual users. And nobody is going to notice or care.
  I think the idea was that these things are bad idea locally or otherwise, if you don't control them.
- If I make a gas engine with 100% heat efficiency but only run it in my backyard, do the greenhouse gases not count because it's so efficient? Of course they do. The high efficiency of a data center is great, but that's not what the article laments. The problem it's calling out is the absurdly wasteful nature of why these farms will flourish: to power excessively animated programs to feign intelligence, vainly wasting power for what a simple program was already addressing.
  It's the same story with lighting. LEDs seemed like a savior for energy consumption because they were so efficient. Sure they save energy overall (for now), but it prompted people to multiply the number of lights and total output by an order of magnitude simply because it's so cheap. This stems a secondary issue of further increasing light pollution and intrusion.
  Greater efficiency doesn't make things right if it comes with an increase in use.
- Modern media scares me more than AI
- I guarantee you that much more power will be used as a result of the data centers regardless of how much efficiency they have per output.
- Efficiency at the consumer level is poor, but industry uses more total energy than consumers.
Yeah, I think the author misses the point in regard to power consumption. Companies will not buy loads of these and use them in addition to existing hardware. They will buy these to get rid of current hardware. It's not clear (yet) if that will increase, decrease or not affect power consumption.
- The lack of last-last gen hardware on the used market suggests this isn't true. Even if it were available, the buyers will run it and the overall energy consumption will still increase. It's not like old hardware disappears after it's replaced with newer models.
- Even if companies were replacing existing hardware, the existing hardware uses less power. So whether it is additional hardware or not, there will be an increase in energy demand, which is bad for climate change.
Every cloud has a silver lining it seems (heheh)
- You can still upload the results to the cloud

This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I've ever read. Utterly striking as well.

Go Read This Article.

Agreed, stop scrolling the comments and go read it random reader.
I used to get so excited by tech advances but now I've gotten to the point where its still cool and a fascinating application of science... but this stuff is legitimately existential. The author raises great points around it.
- This ironically(?) made me go read it. Normally I don't.
  Thank you.
- Come on. Stop reading the comments. Go check the article.
Eh it's not that great.
One million Blackwell GPUs would suck down an astonishing 1.875 gigawatts of power. For context, a typical nuclear power plant only produces 1 gigawatt of power.
Fossil fuel-burning plants, whether that's natural gas, coal, or oil, produce even less. There's no way to ramp up nuclear capacity in the time it will take to supply these millions of chips, so much, if not all, of that extra power demand is going to come from carbon-emitting sources.
If you ignore the two fastest growing methods of power generation, which coincidentally are also carbon free, cheap and scalable, the future does indeed look bleak. But solar and wind do exist...
The rest is purely a policy rant. Yes, if productivity increases we need some way of distributing the gains from said productivity increase fairly across the population. But jumping to the conclusion that, since this is a challenge to be solved, the increase in productivity is bad, is just stupid.
This article is a regurgitation of every tech article since the microchip. There is literally nothing new here. Tech makes labor obsolete. Tech never considers the ramifications of tech.
These things have been known since the beginning of tech.
- What about the climate impact? You didn't even address that. That's the worst part of the AI boom, were already way in the red for climate change, and this is going to accelerate the problem rather than slowing or stopping (let alone reversing it)
- The tech that exists so far haven't had the potential to replace every job on earth, that's the real difference for me.

Boiling the oceans for deepfake porn, scamcoins and worse web search.

Believe it or not, peak humanity.
It's all downhill from here
- I think we passed the peak a few years ago. But yeah, peak from here on out.
- The Matrix was such a nice movie. In 2000 they already had Linux, PlayStation, ICQ, filesharing, old Star Wars (with a good chunk of the classical EU) and even the Phantom Menace (haters gonna hate), and the first 3 Harry Potter books. And WarCraft II, and X-Wing Alliance, and I'm lazy to go on with this

I think the worst part of Huang's keynote wasn't that none of this mattered, it's that I don't think anyone in Huang's position is really thinking about any of this at all. I hope they're not, which at least means it's possible they can be convinced to change course. The alternative is that they do not care, which is a far darker problem for the world.

well yeah... they just don't care, after all the climate crisis is somebody else's problem... and what really matters is that the line goes up next quarter, mankind's future be damned

Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with their latest gimmick.
Look, they replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN!
Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW!
LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It's much less gadgety.

Tech is neither good nor bad, but control of tech is a major issue.
- The existing capitalist control of tech is bad.
You're not wrong. We've reached a point, technologically, where there is little-to-no true innovation left... and what I mean by that is that everything is now built on incredible amounts of work by others who came before. "Standing on the shoulders of giants", as it were. And yet we have a corrupt "patent" system that is exclusively used to steal the work of those giants while at the same time depriving all of humanity of true progress. And why? So that a handful of very rich people can get even more rich.
- Exactly, innovations no longer help to satisfy real basic needs, they are used to create new, artificial needs. Always new toys that make us feel like we're making progress.
Innovatin is good if it results in clean water, meds, housing, safe food and goods and services.
It's bad if it means: the most profit for useless shit that people only buy because advertisment made them believe they need it.
Capitalism is a tool. Please let's grow a pair and stop letting it decide how it will be used. It's like pulling the trigger on an ak47 without holding it tight. Do we expect the weapon to know where to shot?
Capitalism is a tool that wants to maximize its profits. Unfortunately it discovered that changing the politics and laws is an easy way to do that, even if it's bad for the people.
Capitalism is per definition not bound to ethics or moral. We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn't.
- We need to set rules, even if big corporations made us to believe we shouldn’t.
  That's a strawman, possibly aimed at libertarians. Like everyone else, corps want to set rules which benefit them.
I remember hearing this argument before...about the Internet. Glad that fad went away.
As it has always been, these technologies are being used to push us forward by teams of underpaid unnamed researchers with no interest in profit. Meanwhile you focus on the scammers and capitalists and unload your wallets to them, all while complaining about the lack of progress as measured by the products you see in advertisements.
Luckily, when you get that cancer diagnosis or your child is born with some rare disease, that progress will attend to your needs despite your ignorance if it.
- Exactly. OP is mad at alienation, not at progress. In a different, less stupid world these labor saving devices would actually be great, leading to a better quality of life for everyone, and getting a really awesome coffee maker. But the people making the decisions aren't the consumers or the researchers.
- You misunderstood me. I have nothing against progress. Medical progress is great! But what is often sold to us as innovation is not progress but just more nonsense that only pretends to get us further.
Fun fact the first Mr coffee cost 300 dollars in 1971, which would be more than 2000 dollars today
Improvement is not a scam.
Innovation is a scam created by representing change as improvement when it isn't.
And every time change gets replaced with innovation, it's connected to totalitarian\fascist tendencies, because it makes easier to sell societal change which is clearly not improvement.
A person who seriously affected my life advised "Homo Ludens" by Johan Huizinga, not sure whether because of the part of it about fascism in the 30s.
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level.
Sometimes it just takes a marginal improvement to the quality of the engineering. But these "what if manual labor but fascade of robots!" gimmicks aren't improvements in engineering. They're an effort to cut corners on quality in pursuit of a higher profit margin.
Even setting aside you believe these aren't just a line up of mechanical turks controlled from a sweetshop in the Philippines, their work product isn't anything approaching good. Its just cheap.

A lot of the "elites" (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological "progress," because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable "progress," which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I've seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of "intelligence." I dunno if they've fallen for their own grift or not, but it's obviously a very convenient belief for them.

Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.

The problem with this approach is that progress here is viewed like a brick wall you build.
You don't get progress from just burning a lot of wood in 1400s. You can get it if that wood is burnt with the goal of, I dunno, making better metal or bricks for some specific mechanism.
Same with our time, how can they expect solutions of problems to be found when they don't understand what they are trying to find?
It's like a cargo cult - "white people had this thing and it could fly and drop cargo, so we must reproduce its shape and we'll be rich", only in this case it's even dumber - nobody has seen the things they are trying to reach anywhere outside of space opera series.
What differentiates IT from most other engineering areas is that most of people doing it solve abstract tasks in abstract environments, defined by social and market demand. They are, sadly, simply a grade below real engineers and scientists for that reason alone.

The article is really interesting and all your comments too.

For now I have a negative bias towards AI as I only see its downsides, but I can see that not everyone thinks like me and it’s great to share knowledge and understanding.

According to some people (who have never programmed and don't know what AI can do), we will all be able to retire with a lot of money and we'll all write poetry and become painters or make music and have fun. It's not realistic and it won't happen.
The only positive thing that AI can do is detect bad stuff in the human body before a surgery as long as it's validated by a professional. I could throw everything else in the trash as it's meant to replace humans forever.

My blood runs cold! My dignity has just been sold. nVidia is the centerfold.

Is nobody concerned about this:

Behind the wall, an army of robots, also powered by new Nvidia robotics processors, will assemble your food, no humans needed. We've already seen the introduction of these kinds of 'labor-saving' technologies in the form of self-checkout counters, food ordering kiosks, and other similar human-replacements in service industries, so there's no reason to think that this trend won't continue with AI.

not being seen as the paradise? It's like the enterprise crew is concerned about replicators because people will lose their jobs.

This is madness, to be honest, this is what humankind ultimately should evolve into. No stupid labour for anyone. But the truth is: capitalism will take care of that, it will make sure, that not everyone is free but that a small percentage is more free and the rest is fucked.There lies the problem not in being able to make human labour obsolete.

The issue with "Human jobs will be replaced" is that society still requires humans to have a paying job to survive.
I would love a world where nobody had to do dumb labour anymore, and everyone's needs are still met.
- Yup. Realistic result of things becoming automated is that we have several decades of social strife grappling with the fact there's too many people for the amount of human labor actually needed, until there's enough possibly violent unrest for the powers that be to realize "oh, maybe we shouldn't require people to have jobs that don't exist "
- Solid agree, but it's so hard to persuade the brainwashed (let alone their capitalist masters) that the purpose of economic growth should be to generate sufficient leisure time to permit self-actualising activities for those who seek them.
The notion that everyone must earn their own living is going to be a problem soon.
@shrugs @rwtwm I think the enterprise crew would be concerned if the Ferengi owned said replicators.
I've been watching people try to deliver the end-to-end Food Making conveyor belt for my entire life. What I've consistently seen delivered are novelties, more prone to creating a giant mess in your mechanical kitchen than producing anything both efficient and edible. The closest I've seen are those microwaved dinners, and they're hardly what I'd call an exciting meal.
But they are cheap to churn out. That's what is ultimately upsetting about this overall trend. Not that we'll be eliminating a chronic demand on human labor, but that we'll be excising any amount of artistry or quality from the menu in order to sell people assembly line TV dinners at 100x markups in pursuit of another percentage point of GDP growth.
As more and more of the agricultural sector falls under the domain of business interests fixated on profits ahead of product, we're going to see the volume and quality of food squeezed down into what a robot can shove through a tube.
The wealthy ruling class have siphoned off nearly all of the productivity gains since the 70s. AI won’t stop that machine. If half of us die of starvation and half the remaining half die from fighting each other for cake, they don’t care.

So if each GPU takes 1,800W, isn’t that the equivalent of what a handheld hair dryer consumes?

It’s more than your average space heater.
- And that energy doesn't just go away after computing. You'll have the equivalent of an average space heater of heat coming out of your computer. It'd be awesome to compute with heating energy when needed, but when you need AC it's going to be a bitch.
Yes, and you leave it on all day at full blast. And you have a dedicated building where there's thousands of them doing the same.
- All to take away jobs and break the internet.
Yes, but they are not gaming devices. They are meant to efficiently compute things. When used for that purpose they use little energy compared to other devices doing the same thing.

Well, this is fucking bleak. Everybody, I urge you to read this article.

I did it because you urged me.
what a dumb future

Elysium incoming

But without even just the cool space station to just stare at longingly…

Im starting to wonder if the Butlerian Jihad isn't a good idea after all.

THE MORE YOU BUY

THE MORE YOU SAVE

Where my futurists now? Tell me again how a technological advancement will free humans from drudgery to engage in more free and enlightened pursuits?

For thousands of years the ruling class has tolerated the rest of us because they needed us for labor and protection. We're approaching the first time in human history where this may no longer be the case. If any of us are invited to the AI utopia, I suspect it will only be to worship those who control it. I'm not sure what utility we'll have to offer beyond that. I doubt they'll keep us around just to collect UBI checks.

You still need a massive fleet of these to train those multi-billion parameter models.

On the invocation side, if you have a cloud SaaS service like ChatGPT, hosted Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, these could answer questions quickly. But they cost a lot to operate at scale. I have a feeling the bean-counters are going to slow down the crazy overspending.

We're heading into a world where edge computing is more cost and energy efficient to operate. It's also more privacy-friendly. I'm more enthused about a running these models on our phones and in-home devices. There, the race will be for TOPS vs power savings.

Holy crap, I thought I hated AI and I was uncertain. Now I'm sure I hate AI

All these issues are valid and need solving but I'm kind of tired of people implying we shouldn't do certain work because of efficiency.

And tech gets all the scrutiny for some reason (it's transparency?). I can't recall the last time I've seen an article on industrial machine efficiency and how we should just stop producing whatever.

What we really need to do is find ways to improve efficiency on all work while moving towards carbon neutrality. All work is valid.

If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.

Disagree that all work is valid. That only makes sense in a world with no resource constraints
If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.
Are you able to explain why?
- I'm sure I won't be very eloquent about it but simply, liberty. Freedom of compute is on par with freedom of thought and expression.
  Freedom of travel is something else, but I'm sure most people that don't like being imprisoned can appreciate.
  Work (as in energy expenditure) enables these freedoms and I think it's important not to stifle that whenever possible.
Anyone with experience in corporate operations will tell you the ROI on process changes is dramatically higher than technology. People invent so many stupid and dangerous ways to "improve" their work area. The worst part is that it just takes a little orchestration to understand their needs and use that creativity to everyone's benefit.
Efficiency??
This is about the total amount of emissions, not the emissions-per-unit-of-compute (or whatever).
- Not sure what you're getting at. Increased system efficiency lowers total emissions or at least increases work capacity.
lol at tech’s transparency. You have an availability heuristic issue with your thought process. Every other industry has similar critiques. Your media diet is leading you to false conclusions.
- We're literally in a technology community followed by tons of industry outsiders, of which there is a similar one on every other similar aggregation site. I don't see any of that for things like plastics manufacturers, furniture makers, or miners. So yeah, I'd say transparency for the general public tends to be higher in tech than most other industries.

I like that the writer thought re climate change. I think it's been 1 of the biggest global issues for a long time. I hope there'll be increasing use of sustainable energy for not just data centers but the whole tech world in the coming years.

I think a digital waiter doesn't need a rendered human face. We have food ordering kiosks. Those aren't ai. I think those suffice. A self-checkout grocer kiosk doesn't need a face too.

I think "client help" is where ai can at least aid. Imagine a firm that's been operating for decades and encountered so many kinds of client complaints. It can feed all those data to a large language model. With that model responding to most of the client complaints, the firm can reduce the number of their client support people. The model will pass the complaints that are so complex or that it doesn't know how to address to the client support people. The model will handle the easy and medium complaints; the client support people will handle the rest.

Idk whether the government or the public should stop ai from taking human jobs or let it. I'm torn. Optimistically, workers can find new jobs. But we should imagine that at least 1 human will be fired and can't find a new job. He'll be jobless for months. He'll have an epic headache as he can't pay next month's bills.

nice now combine this with shit for brains coin bros and we can all boil together

late stage capitalism news , nothing new under the sun.

This is a big problem nowadays. Looking a bit into the future these incentives might be the reason that electricity will be available for almost free.
In the short run, this looks bad: 90% of the energy is consumed by tech. In the long run the technological advancements this creates might be the reason we solve energy problems much quicker and without killing mother earth in the long run. But who knows, we can all just watch in awe and hope for the best.
- Looking a bit into the future these incentives might be the reason that electricity will be available for almost free.
  There's no money in free energy.