The AI tools are efficient according to the numbers, but unfortunately that doesnât mean there isnât a power problem.
If we look at the overall effects in terms of power usage (as most people do), there are some major problems.
But if weâve ruled out operational inefficiency as the reason, whatâs left?
The energy problems arenât coming from inefficient technology, theyâre coming from inefficient economics.
For the most part, the energy issues are caused by the AI âarms raceâ and how irresponsibly corporations are pushing their AI products on the market.
Even with operational efficiency ruled out as a cause, AI is causing two killer energy problems: waste and externalities.
Recent tech trends have followed a pattern of being huge society-disrupting systems that people donât actually want.
Worse, it then turns out thereâs some reason theyâre not just useless, theyâre actively harmful.
While planned obsolescence means this applies to consumer products in general, the recent major tech fad hypes â cryptocurrency, âthe metaverseâ, artificial intelligence⊠â all seem to be comically expensive boondoggles that only really benefit the salesmen.
Itâs a narrative thatâs very much in line with what a disillusioned tech consumer expects.
There is a justified resentment boiling for big tech companies right now, and AI seems to slot in as another step in the wrong direction.
The latest tech push isnât just capital trying to control the world with a product people donât want, itâs burning through the planet to do it.
But, when it comes to AI, is that actually the case?
What are the actual ramifications of the explosive growth of AI when it comes to power consumption?
How much more expensive is it to run an AI model than to use the next-best method?
Do we have the resources to switch to using AI on things we werenât before, and is it responsible to use them for that?
Is it worth it?
These are really worthwhile questions, and I donât think the answers are as easy as âitâs enough like the last thing that we might as well hate it too.â
There are proportional costs we have to weigh in order to make a well-grounded judgement, and after looking at them, I think the energy numbers are surprisingly good, compared to the discourse.
Reddit is going the same route as Twitter by making âAPI accessâ prohibitively expensive. This is something they very famously, very vocally said they would not do, but theyâre doing it anyway. This is very bad for Reddit, but whatâs worse is itâs becoming clear that companies think that this is a remotely reasonable thing to do, when itâs very critically not.
Itâs the same problem we see with Twitter and other late-capitalist hell websites: Redditâs product is the service it provides, which is its API. The ability for users to interact with the service isnât an auxiliary premium extra, itâs the whole caboodle!
Iâll talk about first principles first, and then get into whatâs been going on with Reddit and Apollo.
The Apollo drama is very useful in that it directly converts the corporate bullshit that sounds technical enough to make sense into something very easy to understand: a corporation hurting them, today, for money.
Reddit and all these other companies who are making user-level API access prohibitively expensive have forgotten that the API is the product. - The API is the interface that lets you perform operations on the site. The operations a user can do are the product, theyâre not auxiliary to it!
âApplication programming interfaceâ is a very formal, internal-sounding term for a system that is none of those things.
The word âprogrammingâ in the middle comes from an age where using a personal computer at all was considered âprogrammingâ it.
What an API really is a high-level interface to the web application that is Reddit. Every action a user can take â viewing posts, posting, voting, commenting â goes from the app (which interfaces with the user) to the API (which interfaces with the Reddit server), gets processed by the server using whatever-they-use-it-doesnât-matter, and the response is sent back to the user.
The API isnât a god mode and it doesnât provide any super-powers. It doesnât let you do anything you canât do as a user, as clearly evidenced by the fact that all the actions you do on the Reddit website go through the API too.
The Reddit website, the official Reddit app, and the Apollo app all interface with the user in different ways and on different platforms, but go through the same API to interact with what we understand as âRedditâ. The fact that the API is the machine interface without the human interface should also concisely explain why âAPI accessâ is all Apollo needs to build its own app.
Public APIs are good for both the user and the company. Theyâre a vastly more efficient way for people to interact with the service than by automating interaction (or âscrapingâ). Having an API cuts out an entire layer of expense that, without an API, Reddit would pay for.
The Reddit service is the application, and you interface with it through WHATEVER. Whatever browser you want, whatever browser extensions you want, whatever model phone you want, whatever app you want. This is fundamentally necessary for operability and accessibility.
The API is the service. The mechanical ability to post and view and organize is what makes Reddit valuable, not its frontend. Their app actually takes the core service offering and makes it less attractive to users, which is why they were willing to pay money for an alternative!
Hi, The EFF, Creative Commons, Wikimedia, World Leaders, and whoever else,
Do you want to write a license for machine vision models and AI-generated images, but youâre tired of listening to lawyers, legal scholars, intellectual property experts, media rightsholders, or even just people who use any of the tools in question even occasionally?
You need a real expert: me, a guy whose entire set of relevant qualifications is that he owns a domain name. Donât worry, hereâs how you do it:
Given our current system of how AI models are trained and how people can use them to generate new art, which is this:
If1 youâve been subjected to advertisements on the internet sometime in the past year, you might have seen advertisements for the app Replika. Itâs a chatbot app, but personalized, and designed to be a friend that you form a relationship with.
Thatâs not why youâd remember the advertisements though. Youâd remember the advertisements because they were like this:
And, despite these being mobile app ads (and, frankly, really poorly-constructed ones at that) the ERP function was a runaway success. According to founder Eugenia Kuyda the majority of Replika subscribers had a romantic relationship with their ârepâ, and accounts point to those relationships getting as explicit as their participants wanted to go:
So itâs probably not a stretch of the imagination to think this whole product was a ticking time bomb. And â on Valentineâs day, no less â that bomb went off.
Not in the form of a rape or a suicide or a manifesto pointing to Replika, but in a form much more dangerous: a quiet change in corporate policy.
Features started quietly breaking as early as January, and the whispers sounded bad for ERP, but the final nail in the coffin was the official statement from founder Eugenia Kuyda:
âupdateâ - Kuyda, Feb 12
These filters are here to stay and are necessary to ensure that Replika remains a safe and secure platform for everyone.
I started Replika with a mission to create a friend for everyone, a 24/7 companion that is non-judgmental and helps people feel better. I believe that this can only be achieved by prioritizing safety and creating a secure user experience, and itâs impossible to do so while also allowing access to unfiltered models.
People just had their girlfriends killed off by policy. Things got real bad. The Replika community exploded in rage and disappointment, and for weeks the pinned post on the Replika subreddit was a collection of mental health resources including a suicide hotline.
First, let me deal with the elephant in the room: no longer being able to sext a chatbot sounds like an incredibly trivial thing to be upset about, and might even be a step in the right direction. But these factors are actually what make this story so dangerous.
These unserious, âtrivialâ scenarios are where new dangers edge in first. Destructive policy is never just implemented in serious situations that disadvantage relatable people first, itâs always normalized by starting with edge cases and people who can be framed as Other, or somehow deviant.
Itâs easy to mock the customers who were hurt here. What kind of loser develops an emotional dependency on an erotic chatbot? First, having read accounts, it turns out the answer to that question is everyone. But this is a product thatâs targeted at and specifically addresses the needs of people who are lonely and thus specifically emotionally vulnerable, which should make it worse to inflict suffering on them and endanger their mental health, not somehow funny. Nothing I have to content-warning the way I did this post is funny.
Is AI eating all the energy? Part 2/2
Monorail!
maybe the textgen content apocalypse is great
