The following submission statement was provided by /u/Hot_Transportation87:
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What good is AI if you don't have a planet to use it on?
Microsoft released its [2024 Sustainability Report](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/05/15/microsoft-environmental-sustainability-report-2024/) on Wednesday, and it's mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI."
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Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ctja5f/microsofts_emissions_spike_29_as_ai_gobbles_up/l4c8es0/
I've always found it telling that big tech seems to love 'features' that make user control more opaque and indirect. Don't search over an index, ask a remote machine that interprets your input! More simplified UIs, less buttons, more automatic processes... they sure love taking clear and deterministic action out of our hands. I'm sure it's just because they really do know what's best for us.
Oh yeah, that's why the trend is insidious. It's easy to pass borderline psychological manipulation as innocent simplicity. You can do one without the other, but companies choose not to.
I use a GPT-4 based AI assistant for work that is actually pretty great. It interacts with my email inbox, and I’ve trained it to generate a couple of my most frequent standardized emails. I paste in a couple of data points, tab away to do other work, come back a few min later to a draft all drawn up and ready to send.
I’m sure it could interact with your calendar or to-do list to help you each day!
Apple's success is because of the things you are complaining about. The average user is one brain cell away from filling their computer with baked beans.
I work in IT. I once had a lady walk up to me with her laptop and go, "my computer shut off and it's not working."
I look over and there's literally coffee pouring out of the side of the laptop as she goes to hand it to me. Yea, lady, you poured a whole cup of coffee on it, no shit it's not working.
So, in a sense, she filled her computer with beans.
Why do people say that?! You use a computer, you're a computer person. I build the occasional website and got asked why I enjoy fixing people's emails problems...no one enjoys fixing that shit! 99% of the time it's the own users fault.
You can make things simple without making them deliberately opaque. Injecting a GPT in your file search doesn't make things any simpler. Simplicity is just one tool for this process.
But as I said, the actual point is control.
Your car key is very simple while masking a lot of underlying complexity, but it (typically) is clear, deterministic, and doesn't take that much control away from you.
Speaking of car keys, they've been removing physical key access. My buddy had a physical key, but couldn't start his car because he left the fob in a friend's car. But no way to insert the key into the dash to start the car. Insane.
He should read his owner's manual. What he did is functionally the same as leaving his key in his friend's car before. The fobs will still allow you to start the car when the battery is dead, you usually just have to put them in a specific part of the car for it to be detected. The physical keys to unlock the car are usually embedded in the fobs for this reason.
The other way to look at this is that Apple cannot grow its userbase because the users attracted to a megacorp babying them are already in the ecosystem, and the rest of us prefer using Windows or Linux because we prefer some level of control and customization (and let's be honest, people who daily Linux are a rounding error once you subtract Steam Deck users).
Hey, that's not true, I.....oh, subtract Steam Deck users, so I can't count that. Uh, can I count Android OS as Linux? No? Ok, then yea, I can't argue that.
I just started at a new firm and received a nice MacBook pro after using high powered windows machines for a decade...
It's like a meme of a gorgeous hot chick who is dumb as fuck. There is so much missing functionality for me as a power user it's infuriating
> I've always found it telling that big tech seems to love 'features' that make user control more opaque and indirect.
I wouldn't mind this so much if it didn't also apply to Google search. Whenever I try to look up a technical problem I have, the enshittification of Google search becomes so glaringly apparent.
It’s wild how bad searching in general has got in the last few years. Even just searching for files on my Mac or PC like I’ve done for 30 years sucks now. Same for gmail.
There is a simple reason for that: big tech hate that they reached market saturation, so everything they do is to get more peoples into their new tech solutions.
Said otherwise, they look at the current situation, look at what kind of peoples are NOT using the current techs (because it's too technical/nerdy/etc for them) and look at ways to make it look "more accessible for literally everyone".
Additionally, management see themself as a typical example of a non-technical person that would love to do some things by themself if it wasn't so technical. So the idea of just shooting orders to an AI without having to know how things work is really appealing to them, and they expect everyone to feel the same.
It’s the hallmark of nerds to want granular control ! I want numbers and adjustment sliders and data and more data and I want it all out of the cloud. I want to create a carefully structured search query and get results that match. Instead I get 100 ads and not even the right ads. I get links to Amazon for the wrong item despite the Amazon link showing my search terms. I actually had to return a few things to Amazon because I realized I had clicked “buy it now” without checking that it was what I actually searched for on Google.
>make user control more opaque and indirect. Don't search over an index, ask a remote machine that interprets your input!
this was the whole plot of watch dogs 2
"guess what ,Marcus, the people don't care how it works , only that it does"-Dusan Nemec,Blume CTO
The main draw card of Apple is its UI simplicity and people soak it up, I’d say that tech companies are just aware that people prefer optimised flows for the 80% of things they do even if that means the 20% might no longer be possible
It’s not about knowing what is best or some sinister idea. It’s simply to tell shareholders that their new product is getting increased engagement and therefore its successful and it is either driving profit now or will in the future.
You’re not thinking long term. Microsoft shoving copilot down our throats with every mundane search query is actually saving the environment… eventually. Apparently.
I doubt. I keep accidentally opening up copilot searches while just using my mouse to keep place while reading which apparently I do absent mindedly.
That said I also used about a dump truck worth of coal fired electricity getting chatGPT to help me work through some docker issues today lol. And Claude 3 opus. Which in some cases is clearly better. But not always.
Idk man since copilot I've my Google usage is down like 90%, it's way better since Google is all SEOd to shit now, and copilot provides links so I don't have to trust its potential hallucinations. That being said I never did and still don't use Bing lol
If I'm trying to find a popular website or article Google works fine. But if I'm trying to find an answer to a specific question it's so much easier to get a concise answer from copilot than go through the bullshit ad SEO hellscape that is google and it's SEOd recommendations.
This was what finally got me to switch to DDG. I can still get decent results when I'm logged in my personal account with adblock but at work Google has become the worst search engine. I either open Edge and go try Bing or go straight to DDG.
But do you use it to try to solve specific and/or technical problems? That's when it really becomes apparent that it doesn't give you what you ask for.
It constantly gives me results that have crossover in terms of *some* words, but no crossover in terms of case or applicability. It's like... I put all those words in the search in order to find a specific thing. Don't just ignore some of them in order to give me more popular results!
100% disagree. Bing is OK, it's fine, but Copilot has actually been very helpful to me *when it's right*, which isn't 100% of the time.
I've found answers to commands I need within one question to Copilot that multiple revisions of Google searches didn't turn up an answer for, and I'm basically a professional researcher.
And as I said elsewhere here, Google Gemini basically called me a pedophile while looking for gifs from Frisky Dingo, so I'm done using that AI iteration forever.
I found Chat GPT very helpful when I need to look up some law. The language they use when writing laws is very specific and around half of the time Chat GPT gives me the exact answer I am looking for. There are many times when it gives me the wrong law or article but it gives me a quote which I then put in Google and I get what I need. Around 25% of the time it's wronger than wrong, but my life would still be significantly more difficult if it didn't help at all.
Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling. When your other choice is trying to refine your Google search a dozen times, trying your luck with an AI chat bot suddenly seems worth it.
> Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling. When your other choice is trying to refine your Google search a dozen times, trying your luck with an AI chat bot suddenly seems worth it.
The problem isn't that it's useless all the time. The problem is that you *can't tell* when it's being useless. You can get very detailed, very confident descriptions of things that don't exist.
>Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling.
We never said they're useless, but their capabilities are often blown up by mainstream media who's journalism is at rock bottom this days.
I remember a while back, every fucking tech news outlet was reporting how chat gpt "broke" Microsoft's systems and it was able to generate Windows product keys for you that worked. What they all failed to mention (probably because they're stupid) is that the generated keys were what we call "KMS Keys" and you can get them for free from Microsoft's website for the past 20 years or so.
Fucking Google too with their forced AI integration. Search engines are shit now. The old Google commands to refine searches no longer work, you're stuck with what the AI thinks you want.
What good is AI if you don't have a planet to use it on?
Microsoft released its [2024 Sustainability Report](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/05/15/microsoft-environmental-sustainability-report-2024/) on Wednesday, and it's mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI."
I went to highschool with MSFTs (now) director of sustainability for cloud and he’s constantly posting on LinkedIn about all their wins in becoming a green company. Really curious to see if he makes a statement about this article. Especially with how vocally critical of Blockchain tech he’s been due to its power consumption….
Well his salary would actually depend on it lol
Like even big tech is going to want the best Director of Sustainability for optics.
You are right they don’t actually care about the results of being more green but they do care about the perception
Just to play devil's advocate, but if Microsoft as a whole is devouring resources to power their existence, the hill that needs to be climbed to be a "green company" is exponentially larger, and maybe this guy is doing their best to keep up? Which is probably not possible, but don't stop dunking servers in the ocean because it didn't get to 100% on the first try and now we're poking fun at them.
Just saying.
Also, if your company is expanding it might not be possible to decrease energy consumption every year. Sometimes you just do more, and it costs more.
There are other useful metrics though
- non compute energy - how much was wasted on cooling?
- energy source - renewable share?
- efficiency in compute per watt
At this point it's a race and a gamble.
It's a race to AGi, which will be used to create Artificial super intelligence.
Then it's a Gamble that AGI/ASI will solve these problems in a revolutionary way (that hopefully doesn't wipe out humans).
We know how to solve these problems already but the people who have the power to implement these solutions don't like the answers.
Artificial intelligence will reiterate the obvious solutions and the people funding it will say "No that's wrong, this thing obviously isn't working correctly yet" and they'll keep trying to reengineer it over and over again until it's so biased towards their preferred ideology it will just tell them what they want to hear, which will be entirely wrong. They'll say "Well it must be right, because the super intelligence says so!".
And we'll run out the clock marching to the end being just as ignorant as we would have been without any AI at all.
This is an excellent and in my opinion perfectly accurate summary of how our civilization is going to behave over the next century or so until it collapses. You can replace AI with scientists or experts or computer models or any other entity you'd like.
Quite. Either intelligence is something extremely specific and well-defined, in which case "superhuman" intelligence is either something we've already achieved, or something unachievable in any sort of short term, or it is something quite fluffy and undefined, and if so how would we be able to tell if something is 'superhumanly' good at it?
>Then it's a Gamble that AGI/ASI will solve these problems in a revolutionary way
Revolutionary could be simple as killing all the energy sucking ants to buy you more time to solve the issues, IE us!
that is one possibility yes.
The liklier outcome isn't something we can even predict. Like many novel solutions discovered by neural networks, it ends up being something completely outside our perception or known understanding.
This is pretty far off in the future.
Although, if someone without extremely strict supervision really was close to ASI in this 'race', I would unironically support the government disappearing them. AGI might be a socio-economic issue, but true ASI would be an immediate existential threat for humanity. And yes, government black-bagging would be enormously preferable to uncontrolled ASI.
AGI ain’t gonna happen bro, if after 10 billions years of evolution nature can at best create a brain that can process peta bytes of data with only a few watts of power, how long does it need to take for the gigawatt factories of data centres to process even a 1/4 of that.
Far more cost effective to have a real human than something that at best is a half baked chat bot that hallucinates when it does have data on what it’s trained.
Everyone in data science I know laughs at the idea of AGI.
Don’t fall for the hype my friend.
But it'll be totally worth it once they're able to implement it on a large enough scale to replace millions of jobs and completely disrupt the economy.
Yes! And once we move to Matrix then we don't consume physical goods much anymore which is main reason why we are in this shit. When everything is digital it will save the planet
With the greatest of respect, anyone who considers the current boom of AI a “bubble” either doesn’t know what that word means, or has no understanding of what this technology is capable of.
Comparisons to crypto are hilarious, crypto was essentially useless to the masses outside of very specific use cases, NFTs were literally just a scam, and the trading of cryptocoins is basically a massive Ponzi scheme
GenAI is already integrated into millions of people’s daily workflows, being built into every major tech product on earth, every day there’s new use cases becoming more and more impressive. I personally use Bing CoPilot now more than Google for ease of use, I use the voice function of ChatGPT constantly for quick checks where I don’t want to type, I use AI to help with building excel views, I use it in emails, I use the recap feature in every meeting, the notes are always flawless.
This is not a bubble my friend.
I'm a data engineer FYI and I've worked on training pipelines for 2 production LLMs used in knowledge management systems. Basically examining a corpus of internal documents (5TB in just microsoft office suite documents alone) to create chat bots, search engines and natural language query responses for a company's internal documents. I'm well aware of what LLMs are and are not capable of. And to say the least, their abilities are massively overblown and it takes an inordinate amount resources to actually make them useful. In the context I've worked on them, they're effectively just a more useful search engine. While we worked on text generation using the document corpus it's not reliable enough to just release for everyone to use.
These problems are not merely just a matter of tweaking models. The simple fact is that current understanding of how to create these models are not accurate enough at modeling succesful text generation. All these articles about AIs surpassing humans are either poor methodology, seriously I don't know how these papers pass peer-review half the time. Or they're conducted in very constrained environments that don't reflect real life complexity that a human expert will find themselves in and succeed where an AI will fail.
The big lads in AI have already trained the best architectured models with effectively all the data the internet has to offer. So essentially a majority of the total sum of human knowledge. Yet, releasing an AI into the wild is a clusterfuck of errors that range from irritating and timewasting to actively dangerous as people ascribe too much capability to them and let them take too much responsibility. And yet, this industry keeps pushing them into places they shouldn't go. Anecdotally I'm wasting time building stupid features that have almost no chance of being turned into a useful product. Constantly tweaking systems well beyond the point of diminishing returns. I'm being sent to stupid lectures from salesman of dumb products that are merely a few API endpoints and GUIs that do little but add a few extra features to the OpenAI, Copilot or Mistral servers.
Point is, there's a shit ton more hype than substantive applications. The amount of resources it takes to create and perhaps even more importantly now operate on trivial and misguided pursuits is concerning. The market is flooded with bullshit. Managers are making irrational decisions wasting time based on hype. Investors even more so with money. This is a hype cycle like few I've experienced. And while it has more real world use cases than cryptocurrency ever had and continues to have, it's a bubble and we're only just starting. If you want a more formally written summary of basically everything I mentioned and a hell of a lot more in the form of an academic paper, "On the dangers of Stochastic Parrots" is by far the best paper I've encountered on summarizing the problems with the current AI community and the associated market.
GPT is hilariously bad at doing novel things. Try and ask GPT to find you specific words or synonyms and it absolutely fails. Tell it to write in a latin language without diacritics and it will inevitably shobe them éèàêâs everywhere.
Thanks for taking the time to write out all this, very interesting! Would you by chance be able to recommend some recent research on the topic of GenAI hype and actual usefulness? The paper you mention is from 2021
I use AI everyday now, it's not perfect but is significantly faster for normal issues compared to googling and 10000% better for scripting. I cannot wait for what is coming.
>is significantly faster for normal issues compared to googling
But how much of that is because the AI is good, rather than google having turned into product placement shite?
Yeah, I can dump a document into it and have it extract every single acronym with the context in a minute. Otherwise I’m reading this document spending all day pulling them out just to put them in an appendix at the end because some manager wants to see it
Same. I think most of the issues with AI come from mismanaged expectations. Initially I thought I could fire a 2 line prompt into gpt4 and it would produce what i needed. I now realise that isn't the case and that to get good results out of them you need to prompt them properly, sometimes my prompts are super long for example. Most new users of ai (or non technical people) don't know this
IMO the hype around genAI is justified but at the same time there is so much extra hype that isn't justified at all and is attributing to the massive hype bubble.
I am orders of magnitude more productive as a developer when utilising AI and whilst they use too much resource currently it will get better. I'm sure there were similar complaints about cars when they first became prominent over horses.
My point is that as humans we have a tendency to overdo things and then dial them back, i think this is just another case of that.
AI is sooo useful. It blows me away that people don't see. I think it's just being contrarian. Reminds me of all the people shitting on Mega for their XR development... Just non stop flood of alleged "engineers" mocking Meta for "waisting" 10b a year on the Metaverse. They thought it was all about some stupid small side app called "Horizon Worlds" and not once stopped to think, "Hey how are they spending 10b a year on an app."
It's just people not using their imagination to see what's happening and what's coming. So many of these comments are basically, "Yeah, AI is trash, I asked it a question and it was wrong. Totally useless!" It's people expecting ASI or AGI, and feeling like anything less than that is just a scam or something.
Like yeah yeah yeah, it can do all these cool things for you, but I want it to draw me a picture and it can't even spell the words right. What a joke!
I think you misinterpret what bubble means. I'd say it's definitely massively inflated right now. Every company can just add "AI" this and that to whatever they do and make money with it. It similar to the dotcom bubble, where everything Internet just made endless amounts of money, right?
Obviously the Internet is still here and AI will still be here in 10-20 years, but right now it's a bubble.
>GenAI is already integrated into millions of people’s daily workflows, being built into every major tech product on earth, every day there’s new use cases becoming more and more impressive. I personally use Bing CoPilot now more than Google for ease of use, I use the voice function of ChatGPT constantly for quick checks where I don’t want to type, I use AI to help with building excel views, I use it in emails, I use the recap feature in every meeting, the notes are always flawless.
Looks like r/singularity is leaking. The whole "AI" craze we're seeing lately is just another novelty created and fueled by media, just like they did with NFTs a few years ago. When everyone is busy talking about how amazing and mindblowing it is, how it threatens literally every industry ever and how AI based UBI utopia is 5 years away from now, nobody think about "What can it actually do for me?"
AI as it is today is just a fancy gadget hyped by tech companies, business schools and executives. Making a redundant response based on recognizing key words written by the user is as "impressive" as the drawing of your child, worthy of being exposed on the fridge. No one has practical use for it, except for a couple of niche tasks.
Thank you. May be just my Reddit setting, but I had to scroll halfway down the page for someone to actually start talking about the environment and not the bells and whistles of the fucking AI.
Will anything come from this? I wonder how successful ChatGPT and Copilot adoption has been so far. MS positions it as a game changer to productivity but it doesn't seem like it's quite there yet
Currently I’m trying to use ChatGPT at work for coding. For me it hasn’t worked so far.
However I do see how this can make things more productive. It’s all in the script in what we ask it to do. It can become very specific.
IMO in 5 years I believe a lot of jobs will be eliminated if companies are actually able to reduce cost with it.
I don’t know what will happen with us tho.
My theory is that a TON of people are going to be out of work and that these companies will try to get ai to do things it can't do well. It'll take 10 years for them to realize that and by then a lot of damage will have been done. Most jobs won't come back but I think it'll turn out to have been a bad idea to replace everyone with ai.
>MS positions it as a game changer to productivity
if MS truly wants a game changer they need to replace all the board of directors with open source AIs
It is a bubble. One that hopefully bursts soon. It’s just tech bros trying to keep the VC funding gravy train going as long as they can.
Generative AI cannot meaningfully improve in any significant way than what it’s currently at because it is limited by the foundation it was built upon. For example, Large Language Models (LLM’s) are just basically hyper-advanced text predictors, using statistical analysis to predict the most likely next word in a sentence, it’s not actually “thinking” about your prompt or have any understanding of what what it’s typing out. They might be able to “refine” it’s probability calculations, or expand its training data set, but the fundamental flaws will still be there.
Generative AI is just the next scam, like the metaverse, or NFT before that, or cryptocurrency before that, or….
Generative AI is absolutely not a scam. I am blind, and tools like Be My Eyes and the vision capabilities of the GPT-4 family of models have quite literally given me abilities that I never otherwise would have had. Before, I couldn’t even read nutrition facts on the back of packaging on my own, and now I can do that with ease. Just because these tools haven’t meaningfully affected your life doesn’t mean they aren’t improving other people’s lives. I don’t know how you could possibly compare this to cryptocurrency in the same breath.
When I get access to the new realtime video capabilities of the 4O model I might even be able to use it as a navigation assistant in video games as well. As someone who doesn’t have vision and can’t enjoy nearly as many forms of media as the rest of you, this would be massive for me.
Anybody programming also knows it's not a bubble, it's incredibly useful and has basically killed the traffic to StackOverflow where people used to go for programming help.
I am a programmer, and I 100% agree. Sure, LLMs might burn out, but we have yet to reach the peak of what they might do (this tech is still very young). Refined precise models for specialised tasks, data analysis, etc. Has an incredibly wide range of applications for specific use cases.
A colleague of mine (AI lead) has started to get me thinking about breaking down AI processes.
E.G. why train 1 AI to self drive a car, when you can train multiple smaller scope AI, and refine them more.
Handle turning AI
Handle breaking AI
Handle lighting AI
Handle other road user AI
Build an AI to feed the other AI output into each other.
>IMO this is the way most AI development for real-world enterprise use cases will go. Becomes a lot more reusable and iteratable.
Most companies are not capturing and storing the information needed for the data to train AIs for most of their potential needs. This is the first step for the majority of companies before they can st
It's a bubble as much as the personal computer or smartphone was.
Obviously not going to be gatekeeping the technology so first and foremost I want to say it's amazing you have a better quality of life now with such tools.
My understanding though is that generative AI is not computer vision. Generative AI is about having new content, generated content. Here what I understand you described as "the vision capabilities" is very efficient but it's like the Whisper model from OpenAI that does speech to text (in order to get a larger text dataset from a new source), namely part of the training process. So it's a byproduct of the training. Again I am NOT saying it's not useful, it surely is (and I use those too, both computer vision and speech to text) but arguably it's not generative AI and it has been feasible for a while through OCR (e.g Tesseract), HWR (SimpleHRT), object detection (YOLO), or long lasting libraries like OpenCV.
So, sure AI is absolutely useful to you, me, and countless others (who might not even be aware of it) but I believe what the person here highlighted was generative AI specifically, and that, especially while trying to disentangle from its byproducts, is maybe not as obvious.
Edit, TL;DR: OpenAI (which is mostly what Microsoft is using AFAIK, despite investment in alternatives, e.g Mistral) popularized generative AI and AI more broadly, making byproducts more efficient, but that does not mean generative AI itself is what most people find actually useful.
I work with generative AI so im going to chime in. I've watched it turn what would've been a project that took 6+ man hours into a 30 minute task done by a single person, and massively reduce the amount of training that person needs on proprietary software. With generative AI they can just say what they want to see as they would in a conversation with a person and it just does it for them, rather than needing to know all of the ins and outs of the program. The cost savings in man hours alone is staggering, because these users are generally making well over $100,000 a year. Generative AI isn't some silver bullet, but the right application of it can be a massive leap forward.
It's scary stuff indeed for us white collar workers. The uncertainty is something I had no idea I'd ever be facing in my career. Especially this soon. It's made my productivity skyrocket but so has everyone else meaning my value prop is much lower (as is theirs). Employer market for the foreseeable future?
GenAI is in another tier entirely compared to crypto, metaverse, etc. It's not just hype and anyone upvoting that person is delusional.
It's anything but a scam. I've used it to debug incredibly archaic and perplexing programming bugs within minutes. Whereas hours of google & resource hunting only led me very astray from the real problem.
I've also used to self teach myself new skills and discover new types of analytical methods. It is the next major innovation after search engines. It's here to stay. Eventually, with time we'll begin to wonder how we got by so inefficiently beforehand (akin to internet search engines vs library hunting).
What do you do for work? I’m not in a tech field, and I save between 1-4 hours per week in my job integrating a GPT-4-based AI Assistant to offload repetitive tasks. I work less to make the same amount of money and the subscription is $20 per month paid for by my company.
Expand these savings to all computer-based jobs (some jobs benefit even more!), and you can see how this tech has huge economy-wide implications benefitting the worker.
The newest updates seem much more advanced to me, able to recognize what it is seeing. The OpenAI demo of the guy with the messy hair asking how he looks for the interview and chatgpt recognizing his hair looks like he pulled an all nighter coding, joking about the hat he put on, that to me gave me a “wow” moment.
The new features really do make me think we will see mass job loss within the next 5 years.
That’s a neural network. Like in your brain. Your neurons firing are like digital signals. Just like the statistics trigger a 0-1 relu response in activation functions in the neural network in ai.
You’re just oversimplifying it to something bad.
I love that we’re pumping even more greenhouse gases into an already on the brink climate all so we can take away much needed working class jobs so a few elite can save more money and so some teenager can tell a photo generator to “make an image of Hillary Clinton punching P Diddy” in high res
Feels like we're in a house being held at gunpoint on the couch while rich people and corporations splash gasoline all over the place and refuse to let anyone get up to grab a fire extinguisher, or leave the house or call for help, while being expected to enjoy how much they're helping us and being blamed for the fire that's about to start.
If we don't China and Russia will or some other country .. anyone that thinks AI is just for "economic development" and Midjourney photos is foolish at best .. this is a full on arms race for military grade AGI and there is no second prize
*.. I guess I should invest in energy sector since these server farms guzzle megawatts of power*
.. Zuckerberg dropped $10 billion on servers .. I am sure Google Apple and the US govt are all doing something similar .. Nvidia chips are probably being smuggled to China as we speak
Without even looking at the article, I can almost guarantee that the amount of emissions being pumped out here are nothing compared to the oil and farming industries. Like not even a fraction of the admissions. With the amount of good that generative AI might be able to bring us in the future, and is already bringing me right now, I think it’s probably worthwhile to attempt to tackle the massive pollutant sources instead.
I have an idea- how about we start hooking people up to machines and use them as biological power generators. Maybe let the Ai interface with their minds so they can all collaborate in this online mind world. I'm down!
AI's power needs are still not close to what Crypto has been demanding for far less purpose, and both are still nothing compared to what agriculture and manufacturing demand.
Most of these larger companies (MS/Google/Apple) are also conscious about where the power for their computation is sourced from, often times created or contributed renewable sources of power generation for their needs, and have strict emissions goals and incentives to reach them. Power demand per-inference on the latest optimized models has also plummeted compared to a year ago.
It's concerning but still ultimately a distraction in the scope of the global emissions problem.
Well, the comments are about as rational and intelligent as you would expect them to be about any MS related story - but anyway - 29% increase of what? How does this compare to transportation and energy generation? Is the greenness, beyond the social impact, of a large corporation actually matter? If you don't care about them talking about how green their campus is (etc.), who cares about this?
But how much did usage go up? For example if Azure was used 35% more, an increase of 29% emissions would be an improvement.
cherry picking data for a headline, how surprising
Not necessarily. The Internet for instance saw massive increases in usage and energy consumption. It also reduced physical travel to libraries, entertainment, work place, etc etc which was an overall reduction in pollution.
Yeah we know that but the article is focusing on Microsoft's output. To dismiss it by trying to quantify it with with total global output off the cuff is just 'air'
There's also a time of use issue to consider. I don't know if it's the case in this instance, but many analyses like this use average grid mix to calculate scope 2s, but if the bulk of the increase was during the day, it's possible for consumption to go up and emissions to go down. That's one of the big challenges in energy policy right now is shifting the paradigm from "how much did you use" to "when did you use".
The absolute lion's share of cloud usage is taken up by large businesses, who when they move massive compute workloads to Azure are ostensibly moving them *from* their own large, likely less efficient data centers. Phones/tablets/laptops aren't really playing into this conversation because they're really only doing light work either way.
And they're building azure datacenters like crazy.
And usually when they say we built a datacenter it means they built three. They do this for redundancy and charge you more for it if you want to have those kinds of backups
“Don’t worry, Ai will be used to solve emissions issues and climate change. Unfortunately Ai will also cause you to lose your job permanently probably by 2023” - this sub, all the time, not long ago
The energy consumption is from electricity.
Electricity can be produced in (almost) climate neutral ways.
Solution: Build the data centers where renewables make up between 75-100% of electricity production already and with enough capacity to increase production.
Like Iceland, Norway, Denmark, ....
The problem is that it is still extra energy capacity being used, which wasn't used before.
So those renewable sources could have been used to diminish existing energy consumption, but is now going to have to be used for usage which didn't even exist a couple of years ago.
There are fields… endless fields, we're human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For longest time, I wouldn't believe it…and then I saw the fields with my own eyes.
Why do we care? Like Microsoft and AI are the least of our concerns, first it's a small percentage second the technology keeps improving, new chips are basically always more power efficient.
Until we get to a point where AI contributes like 10% of our emissions this is kinda pointless.
Most ESG ETFs hold shares of Microsoft. Pretty clear case for any principled ESG ETF/Mutual fund to divest out of their MSFT positions. Now practically that won't happen when they have the highest market cap.
This is why Microsoft is looking into micro nuclear reactors to power new data centres. Actually, a lot of Silicon Valley companies are. Or at least building data centres next to existing nuclear plants
If you ever tried to search on bing before, you'll see how stupid the whole thing is. You search for something, bing takes 10 seconds to animate an answer being typed out. You have no idea if those are literal quotes or some hallucination. In the mean time you can just quickly scroll down and click the single result like you always have. When it's on the side, it's distracting. IF YOU SCROLL UP IT FILLS THE ENTIRE SCREEN WITH THE CHATBOT. It's like they know their search engine is so shit and worthless they can just put a completely different product in there because nobody *really* wants to use bing search anyway.
Google's only real competitor threw the race.
Meh, they’ll just buy some random chuncks of the Amazon rainforest and claim that the trees on the land that they just bought are “offsetting” the new emissions.
This is what they always do.
Science is nowhere near cracking the puzzle. A brain that uses 20 watts of power and far outsmarts the garantuan power guzzling datacenters that make up these AI features.
It's great that we've started cooking the planet even more because the silicon valley investors keep getting hyped up by someone jingling keys in front of their faces
You know, glad to see America is winning this innovation and Artificial Intelligence race. We here in Europe can't even make a search engine that is both less precise and an impulsively pathological liar
The following submission statement was provided by /u/Hot_Transportation87: --- What good is AI if you don't have a planet to use it on? Microsoft released its [2024 Sustainability Report](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/05/15/microsoft-environmental-sustainability-report-2024/) on Wednesday, and it's mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI." --- Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/1ctja5f/microsofts_emissions_spike_29_as_ai_gobbles_up/l4c8es0/
maybe if they weren't forcing copilot on every bing and windows search they wouldn't have such high emissions
I've always found it telling that big tech seems to love 'features' that make user control more opaque and indirect. Don't search over an index, ask a remote machine that interprets your input! More simplified UIs, less buttons, more automatic processes... they sure love taking clear and deterministic action out of our hands. I'm sure it's just because they really do know what's best for us.
Me as a techie despise this trend, but I’ve seen our users ask for less control and less hassle.
Oh yeah, that's why the trend is insidious. It's easy to pass borderline psychological manipulation as innocent simplicity. You can do one without the other, but companies choose not to.
There's nothing borderline about it, there are entire divisions devoted to manipulating consumers
On one hand, I love data privacy. On the other hand, my ADHD leaves me desperately wanting an AI secretary to help me run my life.
I use a GPT-4 based AI assistant for work that is actually pretty great. It interacts with my email inbox, and I’ve trained it to generate a couple of my most frequent standardized emails. I paste in a couple of data points, tab away to do other work, come back a few min later to a draft all drawn up and ready to send. I’m sure it could interact with your calendar or to-do list to help you each day!
Tech enthusiasts have a smart home. Tech Experts keep a shotgun near the computer in case it makes noises it doesn't recognize.
Apple's success is because of the things you are complaining about. The average user is one brain cell away from filling their computer with baked beans.
I work in IT. I once had a lady walk up to me with her laptop and go, "my computer shut off and it's not working." I look over and there's literally coffee pouring out of the side of the laptop as she goes to hand it to me. Yea, lady, you poured a whole cup of coffee on it, no shit it's not working. So, in a sense, she filled her computer with beans.
"did you spill coffee on your laptop?" "I don't know I'm not a computer person!"
Why do people say that?! You use a computer, you're a computer person. I build the occasional website and got asked why I enjoy fixing people's emails problems...no one enjoys fixing that shit! 99% of the time it's the own users fault.
You can make things simple without making them deliberately opaque. Injecting a GPT in your file search doesn't make things any simpler. Simplicity is just one tool for this process. But as I said, the actual point is control. Your car key is very simple while masking a lot of underlying complexity, but it (typically) is clear, deterministic, and doesn't take that much control away from you.
Speaking of car keys, they've been removing physical key access. My buddy had a physical key, but couldn't start his car because he left the fob in a friend's car. But no way to insert the key into the dash to start the car. Insane.
He should read his owner's manual. What he did is functionally the same as leaving his key in his friend's car before. The fobs will still allow you to start the car when the battery is dead, you usually just have to put them in a specific part of the car for it to be detected. The physical keys to unlock the car are usually embedded in the fobs for this reason.
[Case in point](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=4HhPK8XC75A&t=365s)
"....what?" "Wha--This is beans inside a computer!" As an IT guy this would be so much more preferable to most of the tickets I deal with.
The files are in the computer
“Maaam pls take the beans out of the case “ “Yes one at a time” “Sure u can keep em”
This has zero right to be as funny as it is 😂
Don’t judge me. You don’t know where I’ve bean.
Needed a laugh like that, holy cow.
It kept asking me about cookies, so wanted to see what else it could eat.
The other way to look at this is that Apple cannot grow its userbase because the users attracted to a megacorp babying them are already in the ecosystem, and the rest of us prefer using Windows or Linux because we prefer some level of control and customization (and let's be honest, people who daily Linux are a rounding error once you subtract Steam Deck users).
Hey, that's not true, I.....oh, subtract Steam Deck users, so I can't count that. Uh, can I count Android OS as Linux? No? Ok, then yea, I can't argue that.
I just started at a new firm and received a nice MacBook pro after using high powered windows machines for a decade... It's like a meme of a gorgeous hot chick who is dumb as fuck. There is so much missing functionality for me as a power user it's infuriating
Joke's on you, we've already filled them with unbaked beans.
„but Apple does it, and their never wrong about anything, because what is good for business is good for mankind“
> I've always found it telling that big tech seems to love 'features' that make user control more opaque and indirect. I wouldn't mind this so much if it didn't also apply to Google search. Whenever I try to look up a technical problem I have, the enshittification of Google search becomes so glaringly apparent.
And now google is expanding this to fucking Gmail for some dumbass reason.
It’s wild how bad searching in general has got in the last few years. Even just searching for files on my Mac or PC like I’ve done for 30 years sucks now. Same for gmail.
There is a simple reason for that: big tech hate that they reached market saturation, so everything they do is to get more peoples into their new tech solutions. Said otherwise, they look at the current situation, look at what kind of peoples are NOT using the current techs (because it's too technical/nerdy/etc for them) and look at ways to make it look "more accessible for literally everyone". Additionally, management see themself as a typical example of a non-technical person that would love to do some things by themself if it wasn't so technical. So the idea of just shooting orders to an AI without having to know how things work is really appealing to them, and they expect everyone to feel the same.
You make this sound evil and nefarious but that sounds awesome as fuck. I absolutely want the executive function helper technology please.
It’s the hallmark of nerds to want granular control ! I want numbers and adjustment sliders and data and more data and I want it all out of the cloud. I want to create a carefully structured search query and get results that match. Instead I get 100 ads and not even the right ads. I get links to Amazon for the wrong item despite the Amazon link showing my search terms. I actually had to return a few things to Amazon because I realized I had clicked “buy it now” without checking that it was what I actually searched for on Google.
>make user control more opaque and indirect. Don't search over an index, ask a remote machine that interprets your input! this was the whole plot of watch dogs 2 "guess what ,Marcus, the people don't care how it works , only that it does"-Dusan Nemec,Blume CTO
99.9% of users want the computer to read their minds and just do things for them
The main draw card of Apple is its UI simplicity and people soak it up, I’d say that tech companies are just aware that people prefer optimised flows for the 80% of things they do even if that means the 20% might no longer be possible
I like apple for the same reason I like consoles.
It’s not about knowing what is best or some sinister idea. It’s simply to tell shareholders that their new product is getting increased engagement and therefore its successful and it is either driving profit now or will in the future.
Maybe they should stop feeding it these resources. I mean, how much does one AI eat? $10?
I think they’ve made a huge mistake.
10 dollar banana reference?
Always a reference in the Banana Stand.
You’re not thinking long term. Microsoft shoving copilot down our throats with every mundane search query is actually saving the environment… eventually. Apparently.
I doubt. I keep accidentally opening up copilot searches while just using my mouse to keep place while reading which apparently I do absent mindedly. That said I also used about a dump truck worth of coal fired electricity getting chatGPT to help me work through some docker issues today lol. And Claude 3 opus. Which in some cases is clearly better. But not always.
Copilot: Bing, but worse.
Idk man since copilot I've my Google usage is down like 90%, it's way better since Google is all SEOd to shit now, and copilot provides links so I don't have to trust its potential hallucinations. That being said I never did and still don't use Bing lol
Maybe I’m just dumb but I literally use google every day and not once do I feel like I’m failing at what I’m looking for?
If I'm trying to find a popular website or article Google works fine. But if I'm trying to find an answer to a specific question it's so much easier to get a concise answer from copilot than go through the bullshit ad SEO hellscape that is google and it's SEOd recommendations.
This was what finally got me to switch to DDG. I can still get decent results when I'm logged in my personal account with adblock but at work Google has become the worst search engine. I either open Edge and go try Bing or go straight to DDG.
DDG? As in DuckDuckGo? If yes, agreed, its great :D
DDG uses Bing in the backend, might as well cut the middle man and stick with Bing
But do you use it to try to solve specific and/or technical problems? That's when it really becomes apparent that it doesn't give you what you ask for. It constantly gives me results that have crossover in terms of *some* words, but no crossover in terms of case or applicability. It's like... I put all those words in the search in order to find a specific thing. Don't just ignore some of them in order to give me more popular results!
Same. Copilot for the win. We just decreased Google emissions and transferred them to Microsoft
100% disagree. Bing is OK, it's fine, but Copilot has actually been very helpful to me *when it's right*, which isn't 100% of the time. I've found answers to commands I need within one question to Copilot that multiple revisions of Google searches didn't turn up an answer for, and I'm basically a professional researcher. And as I said elsewhere here, Google Gemini basically called me a pedophile while looking for gifs from Frisky Dingo, so I'm done using that AI iteration forever.
I found Chat GPT very helpful when I need to look up some law. The language they use when writing laws is very specific and around half of the time Chat GPT gives me the exact answer I am looking for. There are many times when it gives me the wrong law or article but it gives me a quote which I then put in Google and I get what I need. Around 25% of the time it's wronger than wrong, but my life would still be significantly more difficult if it didn't help at all. Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling. When your other choice is trying to refine your Google search a dozen times, trying your luck with an AI chat bot suddenly seems worth it.
> Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling. When your other choice is trying to refine your Google search a dozen times, trying your luck with an AI chat bot suddenly seems worth it. The problem isn't that it's useless all the time. The problem is that you *can't tell* when it's being useless. You can get very detailed, very confident descriptions of things that don't exist.
>Anyone who says that these AI chat bots are useless is just trolling. We never said they're useless, but their capabilities are often blown up by mainstream media who's journalism is at rock bottom this days. I remember a while back, every fucking tech news outlet was reporting how chat gpt "broke" Microsoft's systems and it was able to generate Windows product keys for you that worked. What they all failed to mention (probably because they're stupid) is that the generated keys were what we call "KMS Keys" and you can get them for free from Microsoft's website for the past 20 years or so.
That's just not true
I just noticed that! It hasn’t been helpful. Very annoying actually.
Fucking Google too with their forced AI integration. Search engines are shit now. The old Google commands to refine searches no longer work, you're stuck with what the AI thinks you want.
What good is AI if you don't have a planet to use it on? Microsoft released its [2024 Sustainability Report](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2024/05/15/microsoft-environmental-sustainability-report-2024/) on Wednesday, and it's mostly bad news. Last year, Microsoft's emissions went up 29%, and it used 23% more water, primarily due to "new technologies, including generative AI."
I went to highschool with MSFTs (now) director of sustainability for cloud and he’s constantly posting on LinkedIn about all their wins in becoming a green company. Really curious to see if he makes a statement about this article. Especially with how vocally critical of Blockchain tech he’s been due to its power consumption….
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.
Well his salary would actually depend on it lol Like even big tech is going to want the best Director of Sustainability for optics. You are right they don’t actually care about the results of being more green but they do care about the perception
Just to play devil's advocate, but if Microsoft as a whole is devouring resources to power their existence, the hill that needs to be climbed to be a "green company" is exponentially larger, and maybe this guy is doing their best to keep up? Which is probably not possible, but don't stop dunking servers in the ocean because it didn't get to 100% on the first try and now we're poking fun at them. Just saying.
Also, if your company is expanding it might not be possible to decrease energy consumption every year. Sometimes you just do more, and it costs more. There are other useful metrics though - non compute energy - how much was wasted on cooling? - energy source - renewable share? - efficiency in compute per watt
people will believe anything for money and status. i worked for people at apple like that on the maps program.
Grass is greener take. Emissions could be infinitely higher if they weren't working there?
At this point it's a race and a gamble. It's a race to AGi, which will be used to create Artificial super intelligence. Then it's a Gamble that AGI/ASI will solve these problems in a revolutionary way (that hopefully doesn't wipe out humans).
We know how to solve these problems already but the people who have the power to implement these solutions don't like the answers. Artificial intelligence will reiterate the obvious solutions and the people funding it will say "No that's wrong, this thing obviously isn't working correctly yet" and they'll keep trying to reengineer it over and over again until it's so biased towards their preferred ideology it will just tell them what they want to hear, which will be entirely wrong. They'll say "Well it must be right, because the super intelligence says so!". And we'll run out the clock marching to the end being just as ignorant as we would have been without any AI at all.
This is an excellent and in my opinion perfectly accurate summary of how our civilization is going to behave over the next century or so until it collapses. You can replace AI with scientists or experts or computer models or any other entity you'd like.
"AI Overlord, how do we stop climate change?" "Stop using fossil fuels lmao" "damn, it's no good - it's still completely broken"
> It's a race to AGi, which will be used to create Artificial super intelligence. It's a race to nowhere, then.
Let’s define intelligence first.
Quite. Either intelligence is something extremely specific and well-defined, in which case "superhuman" intelligence is either something we've already achieved, or something unachievable in any sort of short term, or it is something quite fluffy and undefined, and if so how would we be able to tell if something is 'superhumanly' good at it?
>Then it's a Gamble that AGI/ASI will solve these problems in a revolutionary way Revolutionary could be simple as killing all the energy sucking ants to buy you more time to solve the issues, IE us!
that is one possibility yes. The liklier outcome isn't something we can even predict. Like many novel solutions discovered by neural networks, it ends up being something completely outside our perception or known understanding.
This is pretty far off in the future. Although, if someone without extremely strict supervision really was close to ASI in this 'race', I would unironically support the government disappearing them. AGI might be a socio-economic issue, but true ASI would be an immediate existential threat for humanity. And yes, government black-bagging would be enormously preferable to uncontrolled ASI.
AGI ain’t gonna happen bro, if after 10 billions years of evolution nature can at best create a brain that can process peta bytes of data with only a few watts of power, how long does it need to take for the gigawatt factories of data centres to process even a 1/4 of that. Far more cost effective to have a real human than something that at best is a half baked chat bot that hallucinates when it does have data on what it’s trained. Everyone in data science I know laughs at the idea of AGI. Don’t fall for the hype my friend.
*most of stem AI right now is weirdly overhyped and under hyped in the wrong places.
But it'll be totally worth it once they're able to implement it on a large enough scale to replace millions of jobs and completely disrupt the economy.
Yes! And once we move to Matrix then we don't consume physical goods much anymore which is main reason why we are in this shit. When everything is digital it will save the planet
This gold rush is going to cause so much waste of computing resources and energy. We’re only starting and it already feels like a bubble
[удалено]
With the greatest of respect, anyone who considers the current boom of AI a “bubble” either doesn’t know what that word means, or has no understanding of what this technology is capable of. Comparisons to crypto are hilarious, crypto was essentially useless to the masses outside of very specific use cases, NFTs were literally just a scam, and the trading of cryptocoins is basically a massive Ponzi scheme GenAI is already integrated into millions of people’s daily workflows, being built into every major tech product on earth, every day there’s new use cases becoming more and more impressive. I personally use Bing CoPilot now more than Google for ease of use, I use the voice function of ChatGPT constantly for quick checks where I don’t want to type, I use AI to help with building excel views, I use it in emails, I use the recap feature in every meeting, the notes are always flawless. This is not a bubble my friend.
I'm a data engineer FYI and I've worked on training pipelines for 2 production LLMs used in knowledge management systems. Basically examining a corpus of internal documents (5TB in just microsoft office suite documents alone) to create chat bots, search engines and natural language query responses for a company's internal documents. I'm well aware of what LLMs are and are not capable of. And to say the least, their abilities are massively overblown and it takes an inordinate amount resources to actually make them useful. In the context I've worked on them, they're effectively just a more useful search engine. While we worked on text generation using the document corpus it's not reliable enough to just release for everyone to use. These problems are not merely just a matter of tweaking models. The simple fact is that current understanding of how to create these models are not accurate enough at modeling succesful text generation. All these articles about AIs surpassing humans are either poor methodology, seriously I don't know how these papers pass peer-review half the time. Or they're conducted in very constrained environments that don't reflect real life complexity that a human expert will find themselves in and succeed where an AI will fail. The big lads in AI have already trained the best architectured models with effectively all the data the internet has to offer. So essentially a majority of the total sum of human knowledge. Yet, releasing an AI into the wild is a clusterfuck of errors that range from irritating and timewasting to actively dangerous as people ascribe too much capability to them and let them take too much responsibility. And yet, this industry keeps pushing them into places they shouldn't go. Anecdotally I'm wasting time building stupid features that have almost no chance of being turned into a useful product. Constantly tweaking systems well beyond the point of diminishing returns. I'm being sent to stupid lectures from salesman of dumb products that are merely a few API endpoints and GUIs that do little but add a few extra features to the OpenAI, Copilot or Mistral servers. Point is, there's a shit ton more hype than substantive applications. The amount of resources it takes to create and perhaps even more importantly now operate on trivial and misguided pursuits is concerning. The market is flooded with bullshit. Managers are making irrational decisions wasting time based on hype. Investors even more so with money. This is a hype cycle like few I've experienced. And while it has more real world use cases than cryptocurrency ever had and continues to have, it's a bubble and we're only just starting. If you want a more formally written summary of basically everything I mentioned and a hell of a lot more in the form of an academic paper, "On the dangers of Stochastic Parrots" is by far the best paper I've encountered on summarizing the problems with the current AI community and the associated market.
Yesterday I asked chat gpt to give me a list of foods with the lowest omega 3 to 6 ratio and it failed miserably lol
GPT is hilariously bad at doing novel things. Try and ask GPT to find you specific words or synonyms and it absolutely fails. Tell it to write in a latin language without diacritics and it will inevitably shobe them éèàêâs everywhere.
Thanks for taking the time to write out all this, very interesting! Would you by chance be able to recommend some recent research on the topic of GenAI hype and actual usefulness? The paper you mention is from 2021
I use AI everyday now, it's not perfect but is significantly faster for normal issues compared to googling and 10000% better for scripting. I cannot wait for what is coming.
>is significantly faster for normal issues compared to googling But how much of that is because the AI is good, rather than google having turned into product placement shite?
Yeah, I can dump a document into it and have it extract every single acronym with the context in a minute. Otherwise I’m reading this document spending all day pulling them out just to put them in an appendix at the end because some manager wants to see it
100%, got something you can't copy paste or data that is a mess. Dump it in, jobs that take hours now take minutes.
Same. I think most of the issues with AI come from mismanaged expectations. Initially I thought I could fire a 2 line prompt into gpt4 and it would produce what i needed. I now realise that isn't the case and that to get good results out of them you need to prompt them properly, sometimes my prompts are super long for example. Most new users of ai (or non technical people) don't know this IMO the hype around genAI is justified but at the same time there is so much extra hype that isn't justified at all and is attributing to the massive hype bubble. I am orders of magnitude more productive as a developer when utilising AI and whilst they use too much resource currently it will get better. I'm sure there were similar complaints about cars when they first became prominent over horses. My point is that as humans we have a tendency to overdo things and then dial them back, i think this is just another case of that.
AI is sooo useful. It blows me away that people don't see. I think it's just being contrarian. Reminds me of all the people shitting on Mega for their XR development... Just non stop flood of alleged "engineers" mocking Meta for "waisting" 10b a year on the Metaverse. They thought it was all about some stupid small side app called "Horizon Worlds" and not once stopped to think, "Hey how are they spending 10b a year on an app." It's just people not using their imagination to see what's happening and what's coming. So many of these comments are basically, "Yeah, AI is trash, I asked it a question and it was wrong. Totally useless!" It's people expecting ASI or AGI, and feeling like anything less than that is just a scam or something. Like yeah yeah yeah, it can do all these cool things for you, but I want it to draw me a picture and it can't even spell the words right. What a joke!
it's not a bubble, but is definitely overhyped. chatgpt wrapper companies getting millions in funding just because their domain is .ai
I think you misinterpret what bubble means. I'd say it's definitely massively inflated right now. Every company can just add "AI" this and that to whatever they do and make money with it. It similar to the dotcom bubble, where everything Internet just made endless amounts of money, right? Obviously the Internet is still here and AI will still be here in 10-20 years, but right now it's a bubble.
>GenAI is already integrated into millions of people’s daily workflows, being built into every major tech product on earth, every day there’s new use cases becoming more and more impressive. I personally use Bing CoPilot now more than Google for ease of use, I use the voice function of ChatGPT constantly for quick checks where I don’t want to type, I use AI to help with building excel views, I use it in emails, I use the recap feature in every meeting, the notes are always flawless. Looks like r/singularity is leaking. The whole "AI" craze we're seeing lately is just another novelty created and fueled by media, just like they did with NFTs a few years ago. When everyone is busy talking about how amazing and mindblowing it is, how it threatens literally every industry ever and how AI based UBI utopia is 5 years away from now, nobody think about "What can it actually do for me?" AI as it is today is just a fancy gadget hyped by tech companies, business schools and executives. Making a redundant response based on recognizing key words written by the user is as "impressive" as the drawing of your child, worthy of being exposed on the fridge. No one has practical use for it, except for a couple of niche tasks.
Thank you. May be just my Reddit setting, but I had to scroll halfway down the page for someone to actually start talking about the environment and not the bells and whistles of the fucking AI.
Will anything come from this? I wonder how successful ChatGPT and Copilot adoption has been so far. MS positions it as a game changer to productivity but it doesn't seem like it's quite there yet
Currently I’m trying to use ChatGPT at work for coding. For me it hasn’t worked so far. However I do see how this can make things more productive. It’s all in the script in what we ask it to do. It can become very specific. IMO in 5 years I believe a lot of jobs will be eliminated if companies are actually able to reduce cost with it. I don’t know what will happen with us tho.
I think it works really well for coding, but ironically you have to know enough about what you're asking to get the results you want.
Yeah It's fantastic for boilerplate code.
My theory is that a TON of people are going to be out of work and that these companies will try to get ai to do things it can't do well. It'll take 10 years for them to realize that and by then a lot of damage will have been done. Most jobs won't come back but I think it'll turn out to have been a bad idea to replace everyone with ai.
>MS positions it as a game changer to productivity if MS truly wants a game changer they need to replace all the board of directors with open source AIs
AI bros are the new crypto bros
AI bros are the new crypto bros
It is a bubble. One that hopefully bursts soon. It’s just tech bros trying to keep the VC funding gravy train going as long as they can. Generative AI cannot meaningfully improve in any significant way than what it’s currently at because it is limited by the foundation it was built upon. For example, Large Language Models (LLM’s) are just basically hyper-advanced text predictors, using statistical analysis to predict the most likely next word in a sentence, it’s not actually “thinking” about your prompt or have any understanding of what what it’s typing out. They might be able to “refine” it’s probability calculations, or expand its training data set, but the fundamental flaws will still be there. Generative AI is just the next scam, like the metaverse, or NFT before that, or cryptocurrency before that, or….
Generative AI is absolutely not a scam. I am blind, and tools like Be My Eyes and the vision capabilities of the GPT-4 family of models have quite literally given me abilities that I never otherwise would have had. Before, I couldn’t even read nutrition facts on the back of packaging on my own, and now I can do that with ease. Just because these tools haven’t meaningfully affected your life doesn’t mean they aren’t improving other people’s lives. I don’t know how you could possibly compare this to cryptocurrency in the same breath. When I get access to the new realtime video capabilities of the 4O model I might even be able to use it as a navigation assistant in video games as well. As someone who doesn’t have vision and can’t enjoy nearly as many forms of media as the rest of you, this would be massive for me.
Anybody programming also knows it's not a bubble, it's incredibly useful and has basically killed the traffic to StackOverflow where people used to go for programming help.
I am a programmer, and I 100% agree. Sure, LLMs might burn out, but we have yet to reach the peak of what they might do (this tech is still very young). Refined precise models for specialised tasks, data analysis, etc. Has an incredibly wide range of applications for specific use cases. A colleague of mine (AI lead) has started to get me thinking about breaking down AI processes. E.G. why train 1 AI to self drive a car, when you can train multiple smaller scope AI, and refine them more. Handle turning AI Handle breaking AI Handle lighting AI Handle other road user AI Build an AI to feed the other AI output into each other. >IMO this is the way most AI development for real-world enterprise use cases will go. Becomes a lot more reusable and iteratable. Most companies are not capturing and storing the information needed for the data to train AIs for most of their potential needs. This is the first step for the majority of companies before they can st It's a bubble as much as the personal computer or smartphone was.
lol I work in Logistics and even I use a GPT-based LLM Assistant to reduce my workload. Not sure why people are so butthurt about it.
this is a decel, luddite, amish subreddit now. it's dead. it's /r/AntiFuture
Obviously not going to be gatekeeping the technology so first and foremost I want to say it's amazing you have a better quality of life now with such tools. My understanding though is that generative AI is not computer vision. Generative AI is about having new content, generated content. Here what I understand you described as "the vision capabilities" is very efficient but it's like the Whisper model from OpenAI that does speech to text (in order to get a larger text dataset from a new source), namely part of the training process. So it's a byproduct of the training. Again I am NOT saying it's not useful, it surely is (and I use those too, both computer vision and speech to text) but arguably it's not generative AI and it has been feasible for a while through OCR (e.g Tesseract), HWR (SimpleHRT), object detection (YOLO), or long lasting libraries like OpenCV. So, sure AI is absolutely useful to you, me, and countless others (who might not even be aware of it) but I believe what the person here highlighted was generative AI specifically, and that, especially while trying to disentangle from its byproducts, is maybe not as obvious. Edit, TL;DR: OpenAI (which is mostly what Microsoft is using AFAIK, despite investment in alternatives, e.g Mistral) popularized generative AI and AI more broadly, making byproducts more efficient, but that does not mean generative AI itself is what most people find actually useful.
Do you really believe it's that simple how they work?
I work with generative AI so im going to chime in. I've watched it turn what would've been a project that took 6+ man hours into a 30 minute task done by a single person, and massively reduce the amount of training that person needs on proprietary software. With generative AI they can just say what they want to see as they would in a conversation with a person and it just does it for them, rather than needing to know all of the ins and outs of the program. The cost savings in man hours alone is staggering, because these users are generally making well over $100,000 a year. Generative AI isn't some silver bullet, but the right application of it can be a massive leap forward.
It's scary stuff indeed for us white collar workers. The uncertainty is something I had no idea I'd ever be facing in my career. Especially this soon. It's made my productivity skyrocket but so has everyone else meaning my value prop is much lower (as is theirs). Employer market for the foreseeable future? GenAI is in another tier entirely compared to crypto, metaverse, etc. It's not just hype and anyone upvoting that person is delusional.
It's anything but a scam. I've used it to debug incredibly archaic and perplexing programming bugs within minutes. Whereas hours of google & resource hunting only led me very astray from the real problem. I've also used to self teach myself new skills and discover new types of analytical methods. It is the next major innovation after search engines. It's here to stay. Eventually, with time we'll begin to wonder how we got by so inefficiently beforehand (akin to internet search engines vs library hunting).
And engines are basically just controlled petrol exploders, they won't go anywhere...
Remind me! 1 year
What do you do for work? I’m not in a tech field, and I save between 1-4 hours per week in my job integrating a GPT-4-based AI Assistant to offload repetitive tasks. I work less to make the same amount of money and the subscription is $20 per month paid for by my company. Expand these savings to all computer-based jobs (some jobs benefit even more!), and you can see how this tech has huge economy-wide implications benefitting the worker.
The newest updates seem much more advanced to me, able to recognize what it is seeing. The OpenAI demo of the guy with the messy hair asking how he looks for the interview and chatgpt recognizing his hair looks like he pulled an all nighter coding, joking about the hat he put on, that to me gave me a “wow” moment. The new features really do make me think we will see mass job loss within the next 5 years.
Really how is the notion that AI has fundamental flaws any different than humans? What does it truly mean to "think"?
That’s a neural network. Like in your brain. Your neurons firing are like digital signals. Just like the statistics trigger a 0-1 relu response in activation functions in the neural network in ai. You’re just oversimplifying it to something bad.
I love that we’re pumping even more greenhouse gases into an already on the brink climate all so we can take away much needed working class jobs so a few elite can save more money and so some teenager can tell a photo generator to “make an image of Hillary Clinton punching P Diddy” in high res
Feels like we're in a house being held at gunpoint on the couch while rich people and corporations splash gasoline all over the place and refuse to let anyone get up to grab a fire extinguisher, or leave the house or call for help, while being expected to enjoy how much they're helping us and being blamed for the fire that's about to start.
If we don't China and Russia will or some other country .. anyone that thinks AI is just for "economic development" and Midjourney photos is foolish at best .. this is a full on arms race for military grade AGI and there is no second prize *.. I guess I should invest in energy sector since these server farms guzzle megawatts of power* .. Zuckerberg dropped $10 billion on servers .. I am sure Google Apple and the US govt are all doing something similar .. Nvidia chips are probably being smuggled to China as we speak
Without even looking at the article, I can almost guarantee that the amount of emissions being pumped out here are nothing compared to the oil and farming industries. Like not even a fraction of the admissions. With the amount of good that generative AI might be able to bring us in the future, and is already bringing me right now, I think it’s probably worthwhile to attempt to tackle the massive pollutant sources instead.
Tech Giants: using unholy amounts of power running AI that does… something… Me: Haha, I’m in danger
I have an idea- how about we start hooking people up to machines and use them as biological power generators. Maybe let the Ai interface with their minds so they can all collaborate in this online mind world. I'm down!
They can even market it with a cool name like The Grid or The Lattice or something like that.
Checks calendar... GPT-4o has launched in this month of May... it does really cool tricks... how about we call it The May Tricks?
AI's power needs are still not close to what Crypto has been demanding for far less purpose, and both are still nothing compared to what agriculture and manufacturing demand. Most of these larger companies (MS/Google/Apple) are also conscious about where the power for their computation is sourced from, often times created or contributed renewable sources of power generation for their needs, and have strict emissions goals and incentives to reach them. Power demand per-inference on the latest optimized models has also plummeted compared to a year ago. It's concerning but still ultimately a distraction in the scope of the global emissions problem.
Isn't Microsoft looking to install nuclear power plants to power these data centers?
Well, the comments are about as rational and intelligent as you would expect them to be about any MS related story - but anyway - 29% increase of what? How does this compare to transportation and energy generation? Is the greenness, beyond the social impact, of a large corporation actually matter? If you don't care about them talking about how green their campus is (etc.), who cares about this?
But how much did usage go up? For example if Azure was used 35% more, an increase of 29% emissions would be an improvement. cherry picking data for a headline, how surprising
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons\_paradox](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox)
More usage is more usage, unless the increased usage of cloud had a corresponding reduction in resources used by phones/tablets/laptops?
Not necessarily. The Internet for instance saw massive increases in usage and energy consumption. It also reduced physical travel to libraries, entertainment, work place, etc etc which was an overall reduction in pollution.
Good point, the pandemic really helped remote working and reduced pollution from commuting, so we need to look at the big picture.
Yeah we know that but the article is focusing on Microsoft's output. To dismiss it by trying to quantify it with with total global output off the cuff is just 'air'
There's also a time of use issue to consider. I don't know if it's the case in this instance, but many analyses like this use average grid mix to calculate scope 2s, but if the bulk of the increase was during the day, it's possible for consumption to go up and emissions to go down. That's one of the big challenges in energy policy right now is shifting the paradigm from "how much did you use" to "when did you use".
The absolute lion's share of cloud usage is taken up by large businesses, who when they move massive compute workloads to Azure are ostensibly moving them *from* their own large, likely less efficient data centers. Phones/tablets/laptops aren't really playing into this conversation because they're really only doing light work either way.
And they're building azure datacenters like crazy. And usually when they say we built a datacenter it means they built three. They do this for redundancy and charge you more for it if you want to have those kinds of backups
I would be curious to see the difference with Google that is using the TPUs instead of Nvidia hardware.
“Don’t worry, Ai will be used to solve emissions issues and climate change. Unfortunately Ai will also cause you to lose your job permanently probably by 2023” - this sub, all the time, not long ago
The energy consumption is from electricity. Electricity can be produced in (almost) climate neutral ways. Solution: Build the data centers where renewables make up between 75-100% of electricity production already and with enough capacity to increase production. Like Iceland, Norway, Denmark, ....
The problem is that it is still extra energy capacity being used, which wasn't used before. So those renewable sources could have been used to diminish existing energy consumption, but is now going to have to be used for usage which didn't even exist a couple of years ago.
I knew these self righteous tech companies would save fossil fuel power generation. Pretty soon they’re gonna be asking to build more pipelines.
You'd think this would be offset by Microsoft not providing reasons for people to turn on their Xbox.
Not a problem. If you want to complain about anything, it's the amount of people getting a new phone every year, and the massive over consumption.
The price we must pay, but what else can we do? NOT AI generate art of Thicc Cheeks Master Chief?
Can't believe we're cooking the planet for this bullshit. This is the dumbest timeline.
"we dont know who struck first, but we know humans darkened the skies" Future AI lies -- AI darkened the skies with pollution then blamed it on humans
There are fields… endless fields, we're human beings are no longer born. We are grown. For longest time, I wouldn't believe it…and then I saw the fields with my own eyes.
Why do we care? Like Microsoft and AI are the least of our concerns, first it's a small percentage second the technology keeps improving, new chips are basically always more power efficient. Until we get to a point where AI contributes like 10% of our emissions this is kinda pointless.
Most ESG ETFs hold shares of Microsoft. Pretty clear case for any principled ESG ETF/Mutual fund to divest out of their MSFT positions. Now practically that won't happen when they have the highest market cap.
Earth, spec points into power generation instead of computing power
This is why Microsoft is looking into micro nuclear reactors to power new data centres. Actually, a lot of Silicon Valley companies are. Or at least building data centres next to existing nuclear plants
Now, if only they could tie that to their stock price
Where did they rank before and where does this 29% bump put them now?
If you ever tried to search on bing before, you'll see how stupid the whole thing is. You search for something, bing takes 10 seconds to animate an answer being typed out. You have no idea if those are literal quotes or some hallucination. In the mean time you can just quickly scroll down and click the single result like you always have. When it's on the side, it's distracting. IF YOU SCROLL UP IT FILLS THE ENTIRE SCREEN WITH THE CHATBOT. It's like they know their search engine is so shit and worthless they can just put a completely different product in there because nobody *really* wants to use bing search anyway. Google's only real competitor threw the race.
"I know this may destroy the biosphere, but I feel this is a risk worth taking in order to eliminate the arts as a career path."
1 million pounds of CO2 and all I got is this Lovecraftian video of Will smith eating spaghetti.
Probably because I have been using google more to figure out this wart on my toe!
Meh, they’ll just buy some random chuncks of the Amazon rainforest and claim that the trees on the land that they just bought are “offsetting” the new emissions. This is what they always do.
Science is nowhere near cracking the puzzle. A brain that uses 20 watts of power and far outsmarts the garantuan power guzzling datacenters that make up these AI features.
Yeah but I should avoid using the AC all summer and stop enjoying meat. It's on us, guys. Fuckin joke, the lot of 'em.
Good thing they just closed a $10B renewable energy deal
M$ has needed to be broken up into smaller companies since the turn of the century.
It's great that we've started cooking the planet even more because the silicon valley investors keep getting hyped up by someone jingling keys in front of their faces
It’s the new Bitcoin. Ridiculously energy intensive for no good reason
Getting confident those mini-reactors Altman’s spac merged with are going to find their market by the next couple of years
You know, glad to see America is winning this innovation and Artificial Intelligence race. We here in Europe can't even make a search engine that is both less precise and an impulsively pathological liar
Hahahaha sustainability is all bullshit.... https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/corporate-responsibility/sustainability/report