I watched Nvidia's Computex 2024 keynote and it made my blood run cold

On the plus side, the industry is rapidly moving towards locally-run AI models specifically because they don't want to purchase and run fleets of these absurd things or any other expensive hardware.

This article is one of the most down-to-earth, realistic observations on technology I've ever read. Utterly striking as well.

Go Read This Article.

Boiling the oceans for deepfake porn, scamcoins and worse web search.

I think the worst part of Huang's keynote wasn't that none of this mattered, it's that I don't think anyone in Huang's position is really thinking about any of this at all. I hope they're not, which at least means it's possible they can be convinced to change course. The alternative is that they do not care, which is a far darker problem for the world.

well yeah... they just don't care, after all the climate crisis is somebody else's problem... and what really matters is that the line goes up next quarter, mankind's future be damned

Innovation is a scam, it breeds endless bullshit we keep buying and talking about like 10 year olds with their latest gimmick.
Look, they replaced this button with A TOUCHSCREEN!
Look! This artficial face has PORES NOW!
LOOK! This coffee machine costs 2000$ now and uses PROPRIATARY SUPEREXPENSIVE CAPSULES!!
We need progress, which is harder to do because it takes a paradigm shift on an Individual and social level. It's much less gadgety.

A lot of the "elites" (OpenAI board, Thiel, Andreessen, etc) are on the effective-accelerationism grift now. The idea is to disregard all negative effects of pursuing technological "progress," because techno-capitalism will solve all problems. They support burning fossil fuels as fast as possible because that will enable "progress," which will solve climate change (through geoengineering, presumably). I've seen some accelerationists write that it would be ok if AI destroys humanity, because it would be the next evolution of "intelligence." I dunno if they've fallen for their own grift or not, but it's obviously a very convenient belief for them.

Effective-accelerationism was first coined by Nick Land, who appears to be some kind of fascist.

The article is really interesting and all your comments too.

For now I have a negative bias towards AI as I only see its downsides, but I can see that not everyone thinks like me and it’s great to share knowledge and understanding.

My blood runs cold! My dignity has just been sold. nVidia is the centerfold.

Is nobody concerned about this:

Behind the wall, an army of robots, also powered by new Nvidia robotics processors, will assemble your food, no humans needed. We've already seen the introduction of these kinds of 'labor-saving' technologies in the form of self-checkout counters, food ordering kiosks, and other similar human-replacements in service industries, so there's no reason to think that this trend won't continue with AI.

not being seen as the paradise? It's like the enterprise crew is concerned about replicators because people will lose their jobs.

This is madness, to be honest, this is what humankind ultimately should evolve into. No stupid labour for anyone. But the truth is: capitalism will take care of that, it will make sure, that not everyone is free but that a small percentage is more free and the rest is fucked.There lies the problem not in being able to make human labour obsolete.

So if each GPU takes 1,800W, isn’t that the equivalent of what a handheld hair dryer consumes?

Well, this is fucking bleak. Everybody, I urge you to read this article.

Elysium incoming

THE MORE YOU BUY

Im starting to wonder if the Butlerian Jihad isn't a good idea after all.

You still need a massive fleet of these to train those multi-billion parameter models.

On the invocation side, if you have a cloud SaaS service like ChatGPT, hosted Anthropic, or AWS Bedrock, these could answer questions quickly. But they cost a lot to operate at scale. I have a feeling the bean-counters are going to slow down the crazy overspending.

We're heading into a world where edge computing is more cost and energy efficient to operate. It's also more privacy-friendly. I'm more enthused about a running these models on our phones and in-home devices. There, the race will be for TOPS vs power savings.

Where my futurists now? Tell me again how a technological advancement will free humans from drudgery to engage in more free and enlightened pursuits?

For thousands of years the ruling class has tolerated the rest of us because they needed us for labor and protection. We're approaching the first time in human history where this may no longer be the case. If any of us are invited to the AI utopia, I suspect it will only be to worship those who control it. I'm not sure what utility we'll have to offer beyond that. I doubt they'll keep us around just to collect UBI checks.

I like that the writer thought re climate change. I think it's been 1 of the biggest global issues for a long time. I hope there'll be increasing use of sustainable energy for not just data centers but the whole tech world in the coming years.

I think a digital waiter doesn't need a rendered human face. We have food ordering kiosks. Those aren't ai. I think those suffice. A self-checkout grocer kiosk doesn't need a face too.

I think "client help" is where ai can at least aid. Imagine a firm that's been operating for decades and encountered so many kinds of client complaints. It can feed all those data to a large language model. With that model responding to most of the client complaints, the firm can reduce the number of their client support people. The model will pass the complaints that are so complex or that it doesn't know how to address to the client support people. The model will handle the easy and medium complaints; the client support people will handle the rest.

Idk whether the government or the public should stop ai from taking human jobs or let it. I'm torn. Optimistically, workers can find new jobs. But we should imagine that at least 1 human will be fired and can't find a new job. He'll be jobless for months. He'll have an epic headache as he can't pay next month's bills.

Holy crap, I thought I hated AI and I was uncertain. Now I'm sure I hate AI

All these issues are valid and need solving but I'm kind of tired of people implying we shouldn't do certain work because of efficiency.

And tech gets all the scrutiny for some reason (it's transparency?). I can't recall the last time I've seen an article on industrial machine efficiency and how we should just stop producing whatever.

What we really need to do is find ways to improve efficiency on all work while moving towards carbon neutrality. All work is valid.

If I want to compute pi for no reason or drive to the Grand Canyon for lunch, I should be able to do so.

late stage capitalism news , nothing new under the sun.

nice now combine this with shit for brains coin bros and we can all boil together

Okay seriously peeps, please please please read this so we can avoid an unmitigated disaster:

Cloud providers like Google run on a separate power grid in order to increase availability. To keep costs down, 90% of their energy comes from clean power generated by their own private power stations, and that number is increasing daily. Source

Consumer grade electric in most of the US is only 22% renewable, and all the rest comes from fossil fuels. Source

Moving more AI workloads to consumer hardware would put strain on the aging consumer power grid infrastructure, and would massively increase emissions.

Don't forget that just a couple years ago, people died in Texas because crypto put too much strain on their power grid and took it out. Please can we not repeat that same mistake?