Something fascinating to me about how relatively little we use AI, compared to what it can do… I don’t spend much on OpenAI’s API, for example, but see this graph of daily costs. What if AI was much faster and much cheaper, what would be possible?
well if you specify faster and cheaper but not lower-impact, then burning down the planet is possible
@drdrowland Cheaper and more efficient (using less power) are usually linked. I do think there should be less environmental impact, but that wasn’t the point of my post.
Have you considered locally-installed models that don’t rely on token-based pricing or the cloud?
yeah, i know it wasn't the point, but it should be because we see almost none of the benefits and lots of harms. continuing to not talk about what matters will cause more harm not less. i get it that we disagree in this.
@drdrowland data centers correlate with falling energy prices where they are built. All combined use orders of magnitude less water than almonds in CA, golf in FL, or alfalfa in AZ.
Noise is an issue, but otherwise stupendous ROI for what they provide, and great tax revenue.
@manton I experimented a bit with Fable 5 in my Claude subscription (disclaimer: I was given it for free) as Fable 5 was about to disappear and I managed to get it to research, design and load test a solution and deliver it as OpenSCAD, all based on photos and web searching
Wasteful but impressive!
not employing as many people for the size of the capital expenditure reduces the tax base, almonds are not a good crop to compare and they should be uprooted, golf and alfalfa are similarly terrible. i'm not going to advocate for a better lethal injection drug either. comparing to the most harmful use of something is not a good way to say you're using it in a good way.
building a data center reduces energy cost? that's wrong on its face.
please tell me more what you mean by saying that data centers return great roi because as far as i can tell, the new ones are destroying the communities they are in. doubling the energy use of utah with a new data center will damage the environment in utah because the energy will come from fossil fuels.
@paninid Yes, I’ve done a bunch of experiments with local models. Unfortunately the kind of server you need to run good models is fairly expensive too… Our Mac app also has a local model as an optional download.
@drdrowland almonds are not going anywhere, so it’s a relevant comparison. Useful things take energy/resources, including water.
Long term it spurns needed energy development, lowering costs. Especially given solar’s pricing progress and hopefully soon resurgent nuclear.
by all means, compare the environmental costs of an almond grove and a server farm. and compare the payrolls. the entire data center boom right now is subsidized by billionaire elites. they want the data centers. no one else does. some of the costs are being deferred but they won't always be.