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> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure wh
by Banditoz 7mo ago
> ...it's not just about saving costs – it's about saving the planet
There's something that doesn't sit right with me about this statement, and I'm not sure what it is. Are you sure you didn't just join for the money? (edit: cool problems, too)
- mewpmewp2 7mo ago[flagged]
- dang 7mo ago"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- wheelerwj 7mo agoI stopped reading just after that. “I joined PhilipsMorris to make smoking cigarette smoking safer…” The problems are interesting and the pay is exceptional. Just fucking own it.
- selectodude 7mo agoHe interviewed everywhere and took the biggest offer. Good! Don’t piss on my face and tell me it’s raining.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 7mo agoIt's raining anyway. If I piss on your face, I can at least try to make the experience as positive as possible for you.
- ahf8Aithaex7Nai 7mo agoI apologize for the obscenity. I hope it's clear that I was trying to make a point in relation to the article.
- wheelerwj 7mo agoIgnore the downvotes, this group is finicky.
- QuantumNoodle 7mo agoRight? Like what an incredibly naive thing to think, that BG is going to contain power consumption lmao. OpenAI is always going to run their hardware hot. If BG frees up compute, a new workload will just fill it. Sure you might argue "well if they can do more with less they won't need as many data centers." But who is going to believe that a company that can squeeze more money from their investment won't grow? Tangentially, I am looking forward to learn the new innovations that come from this problem space. [Self-rightous] BG certainly is exceptional at presenting hard topics in an approachable and digestible manner. And now it seems he has an unlimited fund to get creative.
- tayo42 7mo agoThey're going to grow either way. Those new workloads are going to be run
- QuantumNoodle 7mo agoYa, we know. Just humbling the author ;)
- Thaxll 7mo agoThe AI train is going with or without you, if you can be part of it and improve the situaton, why not.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- lm28469 7mo agoif you can be part of it and take a fat check!
- almostdeadguy 7mo agoInteresting disconnect from AI people saying AI is inevitable, but if we’re involved we can mitigate the harshest negative outcomes. Not sure that follows and I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that. It’s just a kind of lazy fatalistic nihilism. I worry about the world and think that these adult children who were told “no” during the pandemic have let their worst misanthropic tendencies flourish. They are indoctrinated in a belief that “you can just do things” for “you can just do things” sake.
- torlok 7mo agoSame thing was said about crypto.
- MonkeyClub 7mo agoSame thing is said about peddling drugs. Profit doesn't push ethical problems aside, though, or at least shouldn't. At least nobody peddling drugs tried to convince anyone they're doing it to "save the planet".
- robby_w_g 7mo agoReminds me of when I was younger and thought of companies like Google and Tesla as a force for good that will create and use technology to make people's lives better. Surely OpenAI and these LLM companies will change the world for the better, right? They wouldn't burn down our planet for short-term monetary gain, right? I've learned over the years that I was naive and it's a coincidence if the tech giants make people's lives better. That's not their goal.
- ahoka 7mo agoCould US tech companies stop making the world a better place? Like how Airbnb made housing markets "better" and and Facebook made politics "better"? We barely have anything left as regular people as our new feudal lords capture everything they can.
- pas 7mo agoairBnB made a very constrained market more efficient, the downsides are classic NIMBY factors. (which are important, but also nothing has been solved in cities that outlawed AirBnB.) on the other hand Facebook made the internet hate machine more efficient :(
- overfeed 7mo agoWhy are NIMBY's to blame for hidden cleaning costs and hidden cameras in/near bathrooms?
- pas 7mo agobecause constrained supply leads to shitty solutions, and people spend their money on land rent instead of spending it on actual service (like making sure there are no hidden fees and cameras) that said those are not new problems, and are not caused (nor exacerbated) by airBnB (likely the only tangentially significant factor is the decentralization of the hospitality industry thanks to online market places, and barriers to building more hotels, and of course people's preferences for renting something more unique, or simply something remote or secluded)
- petterroea 7mo agoEven a 25% reduction in resource usage will probably not be enough, AI datacenters are still a huge resource sink after all
- skybrian 7mo agoI imagine there's a lot more to be gained than that via algorithmic improvements. But at least in the short term, the more you cut costs (and prices), the more usage will increase.
- raincole 7mo agoIf you reduce energy consumption of training a new model by 25%, OpenAI will just buy more hardware and try to churn out a new model 25% faster. The total consumption will be exactly the same. And they're 100% justified to do so, until they hit another bottleneck (when there is literally not that much Nvidia hardware to buy, for example.)
- mirekrusin 7mo agoNot only that, every optimization gain makes it more attractive and creates even more demand, ie. effective energy usage will not decrease or stay the same - it will increase. It's like with electric cars - if you make them more efficient, it doesn't mean less electricity will be used but more as it'll become more attractive, more people will switch to electric cars.
- _heimdall 7mo agoThere's no gain to be had there at all. Any optimizations that reduce resource usage per output will be gobbled up by just making more output. OpenAI released an open source model only because they are capped on growth right now by the amount if hardware they have. Improve resource efficiency and you better believe they'll just crank up use of said resources until they capped again.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoItll basically be the same treadmill as the "just one more lane" fallacy DoTs keep falling for.
- biggggtalkguy 7mo ago[flagged]
- seanhunter 7mo agoFirstly, you would do well to read the guidelines about avoiding snark, and then actually say whatever it is you’re trying to say rather than make insinuations. As is, this response comes across as a very shallow read. It’s hard to get to the root of what you’re actually saying in your post other than it quotes two paragraphs about how it’s not fun to push through the bureaucracy of a large organisation, which - I would agree. Probably most people who’ve worked at a big company would. So why does that make him a “big shot”? Are you perhaps envious of him? Why does openAI deserve him or anyone? Hard to say.
- deleted 7mo ago[deleted]
- trvz 7mo ago[flagged]
- pyrale 7mo agoProbably because "making the world a better place" has been a trope used so much in the industry that it's made it to a TV show [1]. It's fine to be passionate about your job. It's fine to be paid well. You don't need to make us believe that you're mother Theresa on top of it. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B8C5sjjhsso
- gbbloke 7mo agoWhat a gem of a TV show.
- 7bit 7mo agoThe don't need you to believe it. They just need themselves to hear say it.
- trvz 7mo agoYou should stop using mother theresa this way.
- frankmatranga 7mo agoWhy?
- temp8830 7mo agoBecause this "saint" protected child molesters and collected megabucks for her poverty porn empire.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoIts beyond trope, its a cult. https://people.howstuffworks.com/zizians.htm https://people.howstuffworks.com/zizians.htm Theil, Musk. Theyre all deluded that their Wealth and AI are saviors.
- staticautomatic 7mo agoI’ll see your Art and raise you Life https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdrey6U5dU&pp=ygUSVGVjaGNydW5jaCBsdW1pZXJl https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=aEdrey6U5dU&pp=ygUSVGVjaGNydW5...
- lm28469 7mo ago[flagged]
- deng 7mo agoThe greatness of human accomplishment has always been measured by size. The bigger, the better. Until now. Nanotech. Smart cars. Small is the new big. In the coming months, Hooli will deliver Nucleus, the most sophisticated compression software platform the world has ever seen. Because if we can make your audio and video files smaller, we can make cancer smaller. And hunger. And AIDS. Gavin Belson
- almostdeadguy 7mo agoIf you trust what the executives of OpenAI and Anthropic say about their respective projects, its a die roll as to whether or not they will totally destroy the world. A theme of the last 5-10 years has been tech dropping the whitewashing of their reputation and embracing the idea that they what they are doing is incredibly sociopathic and still somehow cool (to them, I guess). Guess not everyone got the memo.
- cyanydeez 7mo agoSurely, this time Capitalisms external costs will be solved by me making as much money as possible.
- giancarlostoro 7mo agoThe HBO “Silicon Valley” series’ version of “making the world a better place by” nonsense. The blog article has fallen for the marketing of OpenAI. OpenAI is making the world a worse place by inflating the cost of RAM and even getting rid of RAM chip providers from the consumer space. Not to mention all the wasted power on compute for all sorts of meaningless tasks. At least with something like Claude I am saving months if not years of engineering effort and resources in a few hours.
- lrvick 7mo agoSam Altman is pro-extinctionist like most of the surveillance capitalist ghouls. He literally invests in mind uploading companies and believes only the rich deserve to "survive" the singularity he believes it is his job to bring about. Sure, humans going extinct is good for the planet, I guess, but be up front about what you are really supporting.
- closeparen 7mo agoIf you’re going to hold datacenter operators to blame for the waste associated with non-optimized computation, then it would seem to follow that they get some credit for optimizing.
- cheesepaint 7mo agoFor me, it just sounds like a ChatGPT-generated sentence. Especially, it likes to write sentences like "it's not just about... - it's about ..." and it first sounds legit, but it doesn't really make much sense when you start to think about it.