> 2. LLMs are far, far more efficient than humans in terms of resource consumption for a given task:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76682-6 and
https://cacm.acm.org/blogcacm/the-energy-footprint-of-humans...
I want to push back on this argument, as it seems suspect given that none of these tools are creating profit, and so require funds / resources that are essentially coming from the combined efforts of much of the economy. I.e. the energy externalities here are monstrous and never factored into these things, even though these models could never have gotten off the ground if not for the massive energy expenditures that were (and continue to be) needed to sustain the funding for these things.
To simplify, LLMs haven't clearly created the value they have promised, but have eaten up massive amounts of capital / value produced by everyone else. But producing that capital had energy costs too. Whether or not all this AI stuff ends up being more energy efficient than people needs to be measured on whether AI actually delivers on its promises and recoups the investments.
EDIT: I.e. it is wildly unclear at this point that if we all pivot to AI that, economy-wide, we will produce value at a lower energy cost, and, even if we grant that this will eventually happen, it is not clear how long that will take. And sure, humans have these costs too, but humans have a sort of guaranteed potential future value, whereas the value of AI is speculative. So comparing energy costs of the two at this frozen moment in time just doesn't quite feel right to me.
I want to push back on this argument, as it seems suspect given that none of these tools are creating profit, and so require funds / resources that are essentially coming from the combined efforts of much of the economy. I.e. the energy externalities here are monstrous and never factored into these things, even though these models could never have gotten off the ground if not for the massive energy expenditures that were (and continue to be) needed to sustain the funding for these things.
To simplify, LLMs haven't clearly created the value they have promised, but have eaten up massive amounts of capital / value produced by everyone else. But producing that capital had energy costs too. Whether or not all this AI stuff ends up being more energy efficient than people needs to be measured on whether AI actually delivers on its promises and recoups the investments.
EDIT: I.e. it is wildly unclear at this point that if we all pivot to AI that, economy-wide, we will produce value at a lower energy cost, and, even if we grant that this will eventually happen, it is not clear how long that will take. And sure, humans have these costs too, but humans have a sort of guaranteed potential future value, whereas the value of AI is speculative. So comparing energy costs of the two at this frozen moment in time just doesn't quite feel right to me.