this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast ... as it gets better, we'll become too dependent.

"all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,,,"

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[–] [email protected] 90 points 1 month ago (2 children)

as it gets better

Bold assumption.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 1 month ago (8 children)

Historically AI always got much better. Usually after the field collapsed in an AI winter and several years went by in search for a new technique to then repeat the hype cycle. Tech bros want it to get better without that winter stage though.

[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 month ago (6 children)

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn't going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

[–] [email protected] 33 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Like the cliché goes: when it works, we don't call it AI anymore.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

The smart move is never calling it "AI" in the first place.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Unless you're in comp sci, and AI is a field, not a marketing term. And in that case everyone already knows that's not "it".

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

The spice must flow

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Each winter marks the beginning and end of a generation of AI. We are now seeing more progress and as long as there is no technical limit it seems that its progress will not be interrupted.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (2 children)

What progress are we seeing?

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (8 children)

In what area of AI? Image generation is increasing in leaps and bounds. Video generation even more so. Image reconstruction for games (DLSS, XeSS, FSR) is having generational improvements almost every year. AI chatbots are getting much much smarter seemingly every month.

What’s one main application of AI that hasn’t improved?

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (21 children)

Which chatbots are getting smarter?

I know AI has potential, but specifically LLMs (which most people mean when talking about AI) seem to have hit their technological limits.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think there was some efforts, until we found out that adding billions of parameters to a model would allow both to write the useless part in emails that nobody reads and to strip out the useless part in emails that nobody reads.

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[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 month ago (6 children)

The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.

[–] [email protected] 49 points 1 month ago (13 children)

That's because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.

Are you fucking serious? All I ever see on Lemmy is prople saying "AI slop" over and over and over and over again... in like every comment section of every post. It could be a picture that was actually hand-drawn, or a photograph that was definitely not AI, or articles written by someone "sounding like AI". The AI hate on Lemmy is WAY overpowering any support.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I think you misunderstood me here as we're in agreement already

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 month ago (16 children)

At some point, someone said the same thing about:

  • electricity
  • books
  • cars
  • computers
  • medicine
  • houses

Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.

[–] [email protected] 37 points 1 month ago (3 children)

A better analogy for AI is the discovery of asbestos or the invention of single-use plastics. Terrible fucking idea.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don't think books ever had the same amount of discussion of how they impact our global carbon footprint, and where it comes to "houses" - I doubt people in the neolithic said about their new invention what is being discussed with AI. It is a disingenuous comparison. (And sure, someone somewhere may have said something like that about basically anything, but usually not a large part of professionals from within the field, like is the case with AI.)

This is also not simply Ludditism, the nature of how AI is used currently goes far beyond where it is genuinely useful in a case of investor hype FOMO, and the hidden costs for our efforts against climate change are real, as are the problems for creatives - who sadly need a lot of the "bullshit work" that AI can substitute to survive while honing their craft - as is the quality drop in journalism, as are fundamental questions about how far generative AI models can truly evolve in quality for the massive amount of energy invested, so the usual "just wait until the tech gets better" is not the easy way out to justify draining said energy (and fresh water) on top of what crypto mining has been wasting with data centres in the past years.

Now, those problems aren't simply problems of the technology, but also of how that technology manifests within market dynamics. But the technology still is not just neutral, and even if we view it as an inevitability, that inevitability does not have to manifest without regulation and within the context of hyped, often unwanted application to basically everything.

Without mechanisms to address problems and to enforce regulation, in lieu of fundamental changes to what market/investment dynamics demand, this is indeed a very questionable technology at this point. And also: To truly love something abstract, like "technology", means being able to - sometimes harshly - criticise it. Think the meme of a "tech bro" with a fully automated house vs the IT guy who barely has tech stuff beyond their PC and some stuff tinkered on passionately in their own time.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I'm genuinely excited about the possibilities of AI, just not in the hands of a bunch of self-serving, amoral cunts.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago (3 children)

I completely agree. However the genie is out of the bottle. Not much we can do to prevent it at this point, but there is plenty we can do to learn about it and defend against is abuse against us.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago (2 children)

What benefit for society does this crop of large language models and generative "AI" offer?

We already see students use it for homework, meaning they don't learn their stuff.

We also see people treat the output of LLMs as gospel truth, despite the fact that LLMs often hallucinate complete BS!

LLMs and generative "AI" rely on stolen artwork. Which is a net negative for society.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (2 children)

Some people think you can use it as a replacement for therapy or to fight loneliness. Turns out, simply reading fiction is better.

https://neurosciencenews.com/reading-emapthy-loneliness-28972/

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.

People here are generally anti-anything. That's what echo chambers are for.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (6 children)

Sounds like most of Lemmy. Honestly sometimes I feel it’s worse than Reddit with the constant bashing on anything except Linux, Firefox, or - for some reason - Steam. Still glad I left Reddit though.

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[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

Cars are literally privileged garbage that's destroying the planet. Great comparison on that one.

Is this /c/technology or /c/anti_technology because it’s hard to tell most of the time.

Well only one of those is allowed to exist so you figure it out.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientism

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 month ago (2 children)

How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I found this article from last year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364

Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.

The wide range should not be too surprising, it's a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the "industry", I can only imagine it consuming even more now.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago (10 children)

That's a huge amount of electricity even at it's lowest. Are they building the AI to crypto mine is also another question. I could see these sneaky bastards combining the two somehow.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

It should be clarified that it's 99.99% Bitcoin mining that's wasting all that energy, any other crypto that still uses mining is basically irrelevant when compared to it

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (10 children)

Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, 'outside the environment'. Is this a stupid idea?

Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 31 points 1 month ago

Launch cost is astronomical.

Maintenance access is horrible.

Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 month ago (1 children)

I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (1 children)

It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won't melt.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago)

You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that's sitting out in the sun.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (3 children)

If the end goal is so little Timmy can ask a robot if nazis exist and it spits out misinformation or so Ai bots can flood social media with endless regurgitated bullshit, then no, it's just more garbage in space.

Ai is interesting,... necessary? A lot of people can be fed and housed for the cost of giant, experimental solar powered Ai computers in space so that they have more excuses not to pay people a living wage.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago

Afaik space isn't self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (4 children)

Fire bad, who cook with fire, fire burn, fire pollute, fire baaaaad

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 month ago (1 children)
[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago

So is the computer you're using

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 month ago (5 children)

Nothing wrong with examining potential issues for emerging technology before they become actual issues.

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[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 month ago

Its worth it for school essays and prawn jesus though.

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