“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”
So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”
The humans still exist and need food, even if they are replaced by chatbots in the workforce. The comparison is therefore useless, unless you plan to murder the unemployed.
A modest proposal
Plan is obvious… to me. Why not so to everybody else
I don’t but the police work for me since I am a billionaire and they can murder the unemployed for me!
but PER QUESTION how many kilowatt hours are they using. not just in their heads, in their hearts and in their booties.
Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we’re going to start examining the human energy cost, we’ll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.
Y’know what uses the most resources, Sammy?
BILLIONAIRES!
…we should eat them.
I’d prefer composting and growing veggies.
you sure any veggies would be able to grow?
I am pretty positive, yes. Hair and nails alone are already good fertilizers.
Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.
“Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network.”
Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?
So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that’ll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.
Not trying to defend the idiotic argument, but feels like more often than not the human output is not what I would call coherent, capable and well functioning.
Well to be fair, we’re putting those resources into AI and not schools.
Well another argument they have is the amount of waste that comes with the churn of fiat currency, where we inflate asset values in order to deliberately grow aggregate demand.
The housing bubble for instance was obviously cheap debt, which was used to grow aggregate consumption, by rewarding asset holders thus encouraging them to offload their asset to increase the velocity of money.
On the gold standard the average mortgage was 7 years, which was because there was less need to grow the money supply, because we werent trying to force an inflation target. Massive windfalls werent common, and thus housing wasnt being bid up via the cantillon effect, so was better for society in many ways when consumption wasnt being forced onto people.
The problem was that things started breaking at scale under the gold standard. The great depression happened under the gold standard, and financial institutions had no ability to do anything to fix the mass hysteria.
Yes, the house as an investment vehicle rather than a house is a problem, but it’s not because of fiat currency per se. The population density increasing under a capitalistic system pretty much guarantees that housing becomes a speculative asset regardless of the specifics of the currency system.
Meanwhile BTC has been wildly unpredictable and when it’s at its most hyped, massively deflationary which is also a terrible thing.
If we ate just one techbro the other ones would fall in line pretty quickly
If you eat one techbro, you consume about 300,000 kcal, which is significantly more energy than it takes to ask chatGPT one question. So who is more energy efficient, AI-atheists? /s
If it fits your macros
A good ol’ public hanging.
hanging is too straightforward
Except the energy AI is using should also calculate the amount of time and energy used to create all the plagiarized works in its memory banks to make a better comparison.
Don’t forget the energy needed to produce the humans who:
- Produced research leading to the creation of LLMs.
- Figured out how to design the GPUs that AI run on.
- Extracted the raw materials for the chips.
- Processed the materials into products.
- Transported the materials and products.
- Installed the GPUs in datacenters.
- Built the datacenters.
- Operate the civil infrastructure providing power and water to the datacenters.
- Planned and designed that civil infrastructure.
- Congregated into a single area to create the town/city where that infrastructure was planned.
- Birthed that population of people.
- Etc.
Hint: It’s the same cumulative energy that his own stupid argument is hinged on.
And inventing and refining the computer
by this logic AI has also used the knowledge of 100 billion people and has the same starting energy debt as a person. with the added bonus that it can’t actually create anything new. Even their dumbass arguments can’t stand under their own weight
According to the article, this was his literal next sentence:
And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.
Where’s Alannis Morissette when you need her?
I can outperform ai while being powered by a bag of cinema popcorn, sit your bitch arse down
Hey don’t get angry at me, it is them immigrants fault I had to dehumanize you
Those lazy immigrants, sitting at home doing nothing, taking all our welfare and jobs.
AI actually kind of manages to do that: it takes jobs and then doesn’t do them (or at least doesn’t do them nearly as well as the humans it replaces).
But, a 4% success rate!
Tech bros deal in false equivalencies. In general they rely on the playbook of logical fallacies. The one they rely on most is the presumption that the technology they’re trying to sell is correct by default as if it’s a fundamental law of the universe. And that the onus is on others to prove them wrong. Rather than them having to prove its correctness.
They often resort to ad hominem by implying their detractors lack intelligence or they’re emotional. This again draws on more logical fallacy that because they deal in technology it means they presume to own the position of being purely objective and correct by default. So anyone who says otherwise is disputing science itself.
In other words they never have to prove the veracity of the technology they’re trying to sell because they divert the discourse off topic to frivolous arguments about something else.
And humans also built the fucking power plants and pay for the energy they use, asshole.
Oligarchs see human as disposable resources
We need to start seeing them as disposable obstacles to a better future
Aren’t humans and biological creatures in general found to be extremely efficient with energy? Given the computing power in our brains the fact it runs on so little is amazing no?
Doesn’t the human brain do what it does on like the same electricity as a lightbulb?
12 watts maybe. But there is no currents and flashes like internet bullshit images.
Humans should not have to compete for resources hogged by tech.
Altman, Thiel, Musk, et al, need to be headed to the gallows.
The problem isn’t so much their reckless careless behavior, but that they can get so many people to go along and invest.
That’s because capitalism is a mental illness, these people are all sick and need treatment
This man is completely bonkers! Arguing it’s OK to feed the machine with limited resources over a human!
Damned those American oligarchs are batshit crazy sociopaths.
