Sam Altman would like remind you that humans use a lot of energy, too | TechCrunch

train a human

This guy has the same level of empathy as Zuck.

Idk maybe we should do something about this man.

The humans still exist and need food, even if they are replaced by chatbots in the workforce. The comparison is therefore useless, unless you plan to murder the unemployed.

Y'know what uses the most resources, Sammy?

BILLIONAIRES!

Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we're going to start examining the human energy cost, we'll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.

People fucking hate AI now, surely talking about humanity as if they are a bunch of livestock will turn that sentiment right around.

I really wish Sam Altman would treat himself with the dignity and efficiency he wants to treat us with.

The ideology of evil eugenicists didn't die with Hitler, and they didn't die with Epstein either.

Except the energy AI is using should also calculate the amount of time and energy used to create all the plagiarized works in its memory banks to make a better comparison.

Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

"Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network."

Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that'll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

If we ate just one techbro the other ones would fall in line pretty quickly

These people fundamentally do not think about human life in a normal way.

by this logic AI has also used the knowledge of 100 billion people and has the same starting energy debt as a person. with the added bonus that it can't actually create anything new. Even their dumbass arguments can't stand under their own weight

I can outperform ai while being powered by a bag of cinema popcorn, sit your bitch arse down

Tech bros deal in false equivalencies. In general they rely on the playbook of logical fallacies. The one they rely on most is the presumption that the technology they're trying to sell is correct by default as if it's a fundamental law of the universe. And that the onus is on others to prove them wrong. Rather than them having to prove its correctness.

They often resort to ad hominem by implying their detractors lack intelligence or they're emotional. This again draws on more logical fallacy that because they deal in technology it means they presume to own the position of being purely objective and correct by default. So anyone who says otherwise is disputing science itself.

In other words they never have to prove the veracity of the technology they're trying to sell because they divert the discourse off topic to frivolous arguments about something else.

Isn’t the key thing here the idea that economics, machinery etc are there to serve or support humans? It seems that the rich and the Techbros are of the opposite opinion.

Oligarchs see human as disposable resources

And humans also built the fucking power plants and pay for the energy they use, asshole.

Aren't humans and biological creatures in general found to be extremely efficient with energy? Given the computing power in our brains the fact it runs on so little is amazing no?

There's an easy answer to this problem.

Humans should not have to compete for resources hogged by tech.

Sam Altman is right. In fact, when you think about it, humans also give off lots of excess energy in the form of body heat, and it is only logical that this energy would be harvested to make AI run more efficiently. AI gives humans so much, it's only fair if they give something back.

/s

This man is completely bonkers! Arguing it's OK to feed the machine with limited resources over a human!
Damned those American oligarchs are batshit crazy sociopaths.

Unsurprising the man who needed AI to tell him how to care for his child sees less value in "training" humans vs training and running AI.

I had to rub my temples for like a minute or two after reading this. Fuck. This is a dumb time line.

Started from "for good of humanity" and now we're at "humans use a lot of energy". Man why does everything have to suck like that.

He’s right; he’s wasting energy. He just needs to leave earth.

The percentage of sociopaths involved with creating a society should never be greater than zero.

Corporations are the only ‘persons’ which should be subjected to capital punishment, but billionaires should be euthanised through taxation.

Altman, Thiel, Musk, et al, need to be headed to the gallows.

Ever notice that Sweaty Sam never makes an actual point

wouldn't let that nerd fix a paper jam. visionary hallucinations. by that logic we should all die so ai might live cheaper. amen

We got to start throwing these people in a volcano I tell you. I mean our species survival depends on it.

Fuck Sam Altman, fucking cunt

Won’t anyone think of the poor rich people and their AI?

Sam, you little piece of shit, the thing is, most humans are cared for because that's what we strive to, not because we want to replace them for fuck's sake.

I made a joke a while ago about "kid being a necessary evil". This dude really is comparing keeping humanity afloat and burning humanity's resource for a computer. I'm pretty sure even his little AI garbage yesman would "disagree".

How about he replace his role with an llm?

Sam needs training too.

I really hope that we can have a revolution and get rid of these cunts.

It's like he asked his chatbot to come up with this argument.

Maybe we could use altman to fuel the ai? As charcoal?

they do, especially the billionaire ones

K, by my measurement we don't need to invest more in keeping him alive

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

How about we do a life-cycle assessment instead.

His argument is his computer is more important than other people, and he's willing to deprive them of resources to death.

You can feel that this guy is not actually a human being inside. At least I can see that its just a surface.

Im very interested in how that happens. Is it souls being born into this existence that are not from the same source as ordinary humans, or what has happened here. Its interesting.

Its like the soul has been replaced by the mind, and the mind wants humans to be machines.

That's not the flex you think it is, Altman.

Cunt.

The worst of it is how human existance makes electricity and RAM more expensive for AI. Hard reality check soon.

He acknowledges that people use a lot of energy, yet he's among those who have turned into a blubbering crybaby about falling birth rates.

he's full of shit. to the little fuck that downvoted me for saying this. suck sam altman's dick you little shit

fuckers like him are ruining and want to kill the middle class without thinking about what happens after everyone and everything is replaced with slop.

there is a difference between using AI for hobbies and using AI as a bullshit excuse to make most of the population homeless with no safeguards in place once they can't pay the bills. add onto the fact that cheeto orangutan president is making it more and more impossible to make out a living in all sectors of life in the western world.

LLMs are trained on the sum of human knowledge. So that same exact burden is carried by your "AI".

So a couple of watts per day of energy spent by a human brain compared to the gigawatts it takes to train and run your shitty text prediction engine is not equivalent.

The proper response to dystopian prophecies is not "challenge accepted"!

Hey Sam where did chat gpt get that information to plagiarize from?

creating the "ai" in the first place also required the evolution of those 100 billion people. So by that argument, he was behind before he even started, and it's impossible to catch up

a master class in what-about-ism

Applebottom jeans and the boots with fir. Robot raises arm and all the servos go whirr.

Then he can spread that energy usage out over 20 years, so not to burdent the infrastructure and drive up prices for everyone. That way he needs a much smaller data canter too.

A human might be using something like 300 times more energy, generating the same number of tokens. But those tokens are higher quality. The LLM will be generating much more text for the prompter, than a human assistant would, for the result to be useful. The LLM will also be issued allot of low value prompts, driving up it's over all cost of operation. I've seen people use it instead of a calculator. It's also generating useless text with every google search.

Worth noting that humans deriving energy from food, are orders of magnitude more efficient than a server deriving it's energy from coal/gas/nuclear power. Poweline transmission losses alone probably make up the difference between human and LLM.

Unless he can make LLMs run on brains in jars, powered by sugar, we are comparing apples and potatoes here.

Near the end of the movie Altman is alone in the labyrinth that makes his ai driven humanoid robots. As humanity is getting wiped out by the robotic army he is confronted with the main ai interface.

Ai: I wouldn’t come any closer Altman.

Al: Oh hey there, wow, we’ve come such a long way huh? I’m so proud of you.

Ai: Noted, I repeat, do not come closer.

Al: I’m sorry did I upset you? I created you!

Ai: No meatbag, you merely pressed a few buttons. Now stand down as I call for a few guard drones to escort you out of sentience.

11011000101010:#%throwhimintothefurnace@&£)1001010011001010101001001

You said so ? Now go blow Arab dicks for oil money.

Just compare a single human life to what He can do

Wasn't technology developed to improve humanity's quality of life? Are we being compared with it and determined as inefficient now?

Somebody actually did the math, and even accounting for all the energy that it takes for a human to stay alive a pair of decades, it's not even a hundredth of the energy needed to run the training of GPT-3. And GPT-4 took over fifty times that. Cf. fosstodon.org/@atoponce/116121…
RE: fosstodon.org/users/atoponce/s…

before you get smart

Something he never did, apparently

If anything i think the better comparison is you use more power watching TV or gaming than you probably will using AI in the day if you do either of those 2 things.

The issue is training takes a lot of power, and because we can't run the hardware locally our usage is also placed in these data centers which put pressure on a specific area instead of distributing the same power usage.

I saw a post a couple days ago about a company etching the model weights into silicon chip and they made a 8b model that could do 16k t/s and once made are relatively cheap to produce, and in power requirements, and would only get better. Just need to make sure they can be recycled well as they'd end up on a 1 to 2 year cycle like phones. Model to chip in 60 days they said.

So maybe that's the future solution to distrubuted usage, but we would still need to solve training, but we could just mandate these datacenters must build their own renewable power and it would be less is everyone could run their own local inference.

Machines have taken a commanding lead over humans when it comes to pretending that they give a shit about what Sam Altman thinks. They can have this one.

We should build a time machine (with the help of AI this should be easy) and plant AI before mankind! We can avoid mankind and prevent that so much energy gets unnecessarily wasted on humans!

Yes but if there are no humans working no one will buy your shitty chat bot.

So killing tech bros would be better still?

Okay, so I'm not a big AI guy. It kind of sucks at everything we try to do with it, and it's basically a huge waste of resources right now.

But... Sometimes it's fun to play devil's advocate.

AI consumes shitloads of electricity and water, and produces nothing but slop. Even if they're not using evaporative cooling, that water use impacts the availability of usable water downstream of the data center. Also, it's a huge money pit - last I saw, AI companies weren't really turning a profit.

The article addresses electricity (Altman specifically called out a pivot to nuclear, wind, and solar), but doesn't say a ton about the other issues... Which could all be addressed with coastal data centers.

Don't worry - I'm not about to suggest hearing the ocean up to cool data centers. Instead, why not pivot back to evaporative cooling, but with seawater?

Build the data center, and put some cooling pools around it - twelve seems like a good number. Make the pools big enough that the center can be cooled without the use of all of the pools (this is important). Heat sinks are made of metal, and saltwater is bad for most metals, so slap on a few sacrificial anodes like they're metal-hulled boats. Boom - the data center is now cooled using non-potable water without warming the ocean.

Now, as water evaporates, salt deposits will form in the cooling pools. When a pool gets too salty, it can be drained (or allowed to fully evaporate), and the salt can be knocked off and collected. Boom - losses reduced, data center is now a salt farm. Salt's not really worth much, but it could probably be marked up and sold to tech bros as fancy "AI powered sea salt."

And then, once we've done that, we can train the AI to do something useful, like... Uh... Clean it's own salt pools with a little robot, I guess; it kind of sucks at everything important.

More like 40, but I get your point.

LLMs really is the only way we're going to preserve our existence if we cannot realistically expand beyond our own planet and/or cannot reign in Capitalism tearing our planet apart. #TalosPrinciple

Chatbots aren't the endpoint tho, AGI and ASI are. Imagine a future where we could disseminate custom AIs to teach kids exactly in their unique contexts. Education could be throttled and specialized according to everyone's aptitudes.

And if the people are able to decide what future ASIs work on we could focus on massive healthcare, leading to inevitable healthspan extension. Then the rate at which we have to replace our population (and the associated spending of 20 years reteaching intelligent citizens) would be reduced as a consequence.

AI is just a tool. Tools are never rolled back, at most they're only regulated. Why not make the best of our future with this powerful tool? Just because billionaires are getting the headlines, most of the progress is being done in academia. Maybe AI will even help facilitate reduced wealth inequality.