… and neither does the author (or so I believe - I made them both up).

On the other hand, AI is definitely good at creative writing.

  • The assumption I’m making is that the total hardware and energy cost scales linearly with the API pricing.

    This is not a good assumption. NONE of the GPT plans make any amount of profit, so the pricing is not going to be linked to hardware and energy costs, but rather toward addicting people to the product so they can raise the prices into profitability at an impossible future when people can’t live without their shit products.

    Though what we should be thinking about is not just the cost in absolute terms, but in relation to the benefit.

    The benefit is zero, so the cost:benefit ratio is ∞.

    • howrar@lemmy.ca
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      1 month ago

      Yeah, they operate very opaquely, so we can’t know the true cost, but based on what I can know with certainty given models I can run on my own machines, the numbers seem reasonable. In any case, that’s not really relevant to this discussion. Treat it as a hypothetical, then work out the math later to figure out where we want to be and what threshold we should be setting.

      • For me the threshold is zero. LLMs are dead ends and cannot really be improved much beyond where they are now, complete with hallucinations and techbrodude confidence.

        The billions being wasted on LLMs are better spent on less idiotic technologies less likely to destroy trust in information sources.

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          1 month ago

          It sounds like you don’t like how LLMs are currently used, not their power consumption.

          I agree that they’re a dead end. But I also don’t think they need much improvement over what we currently have. We just need to stop jamming them where they don’t belong and leave them be where they shine.

          • It is possible to despise everything about LLMs from the “podcast bro” types who hype it to the environmental costs to the dangers they represent in actual use.

            Very rarely in history are there inventions that have no redeeming qualities whatsoever. LLMs are shaping up to be one of them. Thankfully they’re running the hype curve on fast forward and look like they won’t actually climb the right side of it. In five years they won’t be anything but detritus on the trail of “progress”.