this post was submitted on 21 May 2025
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Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast ... as it gets better, we'll become too dependent.

"all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,,,"

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[–] [email protected] 77 points 1 week ago (2 children)

as it gets better

Bold assumption.

[–] [email protected] 34 points 1 week ago (43 children)

Historically AI always got much better. Usually after the field collapsed in an AI winter and several years went by in search for a new technique to then repeat the hype cycle. Tech bros want it to get better without that winter stage though.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 6 days ago

That's part of why they installed Donald Trump as the dictator of the United States. The other is the network states.

[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 week ago (6 children)

AI usually got better when people realized it wasn't going to do all it was hyped up for but was useful for a certain set of tasks.

Then it turned from world-changing hotness to super boring tech your washing machine uses to fine-tune its washing program.

[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Like the cliché goes: when it works, we don't call it AI anymore.

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[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 week ago

The spice must flow

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

Yeah, I think there was some efforts, until we found out that adding billions of parameters to a model would allow both to write the useless part in emails that nobody reads and to strip out the useless part in emails that nobody reads.

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 week ago (7 children)

The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It's so tiring.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago (1 children)

Partly, yep. Seems like every time I try to pin down an AI on a detail of a question worth asking - a math question, or a date in history, it'll confidently reply with the first answer it finds ... right or wrong.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 3 days ago

I don't think accuracy is an issue either. I've been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It's really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other.

The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.

[–] [email protected] 48 points 1 week ago (13 children)

That's because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.

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[–] pelespirit 17 points 1 week ago (2 children)

How does crypto mining play into all of the electrical need? I know they used to use a butt load.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I found this article from last year: https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=61364

Our preliminary estimates suggest that annual electricity use from cryptocurrency mining probably represents from 0.6% to 2.3% of U.S. electricity consumption.

The wide range should not be too surprising, it's a mess to keep track of, especially with the current administration. Since then, with Trump immediately pledging to support the "industry", I can only imagine it consuming even more now.

[–] pelespirit 7 points 1 week ago (10 children)

That's a huge amount of electricity even at it's lowest. Are they building the AI to crypto mine is also another question. I could see these sneaky bastards combining the two somehow.

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[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (10 children)

Solar powered server farms in space. Self-powered, self-cooling, 'outside the environment'. Is this a stupid idea?

Edit: So it would seem the answer is yes. Good chat :) Thanks.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 1 week ago

Launch cost is astronomical.

Maintenance access is horrible.

Temperature delta is insane, upto 250C.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 1 week ago (1 children)

I don’t understand the self-cooling. Isn’t it harder to keep things cool in space since there is no conduction or convection cooling? I mean everything is in a vacuum. The only place for heat to go is radiative and that’s terribly inefficient. Seems like a massive engineering problem.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 week ago (1 children)

It is, infrared radiators weight a shit ton and are inefficient, big and unwieldy. Still the only viable option for cooling in space. AI would take an hugemongous square footage of it just so the GPUs won't melt.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

You can cool servers way better on Earth than you can in space. Down here you can transfer heat away from the server with conduction and convection, but in space you really only have radiation. Cooling spacecraft is an engineering challenge. One might imagine a server stuck inside a glass thermos that's sitting out in the sun.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (3 children)

If the end goal is so little Timmy can ask a robot if nazis exist and it spits out misinformation or so Ai bots can flood social media with endless regurgitated bullshit, then no, it's just more garbage in space.

Ai is interesting,... necessary? A lot of people can be fed and housed for the cost of giant, experimental solar powered Ai computers in space so that they have more excuses not to pay people a living wage.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 week ago

Afaik space isn't self cooling. Overheating of spacecraft is a thing. I think they can only cool through infrared radiation or something.

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