Google has been burning compute for the past 25 years to shove ads at people. We all lost there, too, but he apparently didn’t mind that.

It's dumb, but energy wise, isn't this similar to leaving the TV on for a few minutes even though nobody is watching it?

Like, the ratio is not too crazy, it's rather the large resource usages that comes from the aggregate of millions of people choosing to use it.

If you assume all of those queries provide no value then obviously that's bad. But presumably there's some net positive value that people get out of that such that they're choosing to use it. And yes, many times the value of those queries to society as a whole is negative... I would hope that it's positive enough though.

> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree.

I find it difficult to express how strongly I disagree with this sentiment.

Serving unwanted ads has what cost-benefit-ratio vs serving LLM:s that are wanted by the user?

> Everything humans do is harmful to some degree

That's just not true... When a mother nurses her child and then looks into their eyes and smiles, it takes the utmost in cynical nihilism to claim that is harmful.

> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Well the people who burnt compute got it from money so they did burn money.

But they don't care about burning money if they can get more money via investors/other inputs faster than they can burn (fun fact: sometimes they even outspend that input)

So in a way the investors are burning their money, now they burn the money because the market is becoming irrational. Remember Devin? Yes cognition labs is still there etc. but I remember people investing into these because of their hype when it did turn out to be moot comparative to their hype.

But people/market was so irrational that most of these private equities were unable to invest in something like openai that they are investing in anything AI related.

And when you think more deeper about all the bubble activities. It becomes apparent that in the end bailouts feel more possible than not which would be an tax on average taxpayers and they are already paying an AI tax in multiple forms whether it be in the inflation of ram prices due to AI or increase in electricity or water rates.

So repeat it with me: whose gonna pay for all this, we all would but the biggest disservice which is the core of the argument is that if we are paying for these things, then why don't we have a say in it. Why are we not having a say in AI related companies and the issues relating to that when people know it might take their jobs etc. so the average public in fact hates AI (shocking I know /satire) but the fact that its still being pushed shows how little influence sometimes public can have.

Basically public can have any opinions but we won't stop is the thing happening in AI space imo completely disregarding any thoughts about the general public while the CFO of openAI proposing an idea that public can bailout chatgpt or something tangential.

Shaking my head...

> Somebody burned compute to send him an LLM-generated thank-you note. Everybody involved in this transaction lost, nobody gained anything from it. It's pure destruction of resources.

Just like the invention of Go.

Somebody just burned their refuse in a developing country somewhere. I guess if it was cold, at least they were warming themselves up.

Cutting trees for fuel and paper to send a letter burned resources. Nobody gained in that transaction