AI as Normal Technology

Burning the planet for a ponzi scheme isn't normal.

The healthiest thing for /actual/ AI to develop is for the current addiction to LLMs to die off. For the current bets by OpenAI, Gemini, DeepSeek, etc to lose steam. Prompts are a distraction, and every single company trying to commodify this are facing an impossible problem in /paying for the electricity/. Currently they're just insisting on building more power plants, more datacenters, which is like trying to do more compute with vacuum relays. They're digging in the wrong place for breakthroughs, and all the current ventures will go bust and be losses for investors. If they start doing computation with photons or something like that, then call me back.

All data centres consume ~1% of global electricity. A very small fraction.

Virtually all of this is false. AI is neither burning the planet nor a ponzi scheme. If you're concerned about energy costs, consider for just a second that increased demand for computation directly incentivizes the construction of datacenters, co-located with renewable (read: free) energy sources at scale. ChatGPT isn't going to be powered by diesel.

If only Chomsky and Lisp received this level of investment, we would have pure philosophical symbolic logic proving the answer to the universe by now

The only thing standing in the way of nuclear/solar/hydroelectric data centers is local laws and regulations. All the big cloud providers are actively researching this. see Microsoft's interest in acquiring the three mile island nuclear reactor for an example[1]

[1] https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/09/26/1104516/three-mi...

In reality: renewables are siphoned away from replacing dirty energy. Dirty energy is still the same %, but the more energy computation needs, it might be added as renewables.

I feel like the quadratic scaling laws are going to win in the end.

We need new techniques and algorithms, not new datacenters.

That's funny because to me 1% of all electricity seems like a huge number.

If I was optimizing something I wouldn't start with something taking 1% of electricity.