<story><title>The new Bing will happily give you citations for a pile of nonsense</title><url>https://twitter.com/arbuge/status/1626283571294896128</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodah</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases. For all the pushback crypto got here, it&amp;#x27;s fascinating to see the support that this grift has gotten. The grift being the amount of energy we burn training models juxtaposed to the price people will pay for a nothing burger.&lt;p&gt;Things like Stable Diffusion and DALLE are pretty cool, though a bit novel and toyish at this stage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>humanistbot</author><text>Except the energy costs for these models is such a tiny fraction of crypto. Cambridge researchers estimate annual energy consumption of just bitcoin at 119 terawatt hours (TWh) [1] or 60 megatons of CO2 [2], just below all of Portugal.&lt;p&gt;Meanwhile, even a very critical paper on this from some Scandinavian researchers [3] says GPT-3 cost 190,000 kWh (0.00019 TWh) to train. ChatGPT&amp;#x2F;GPT-3.5 is allegedly an order of magnitude larger in terms of data and cost to train, so let&amp;#x27;s say it is 0.0019 TWh.&lt;p&gt;When The Register reported on that paper, you can see how they tried as hard as they could to make it sound big: the cost to train GPT-3 was the same as driving a car to the moon and back (435k miles). They could have said it cost the same amount of carbon as 25 US drivers emit each year. In the grand scheme of things, that&amp;#x27;s nothing. That&amp;#x27;s one long-haul flight per trained model. And you just need to train them once. Querying the models cost far less.&lt;p&gt;And the electricity generated for US-based server farms is way cleaner than cars, planes, or the coal mines powering Chinese bitcoin mines.&lt;p&gt;[1] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ccaf.io&amp;#x2F;cbeci&amp;#x2F;index&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ccaf.io&amp;#x2F;cbeci&amp;#x2F;index&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[2] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ccaf.io&amp;#x2F;cbeci&amp;#x2F;ghg&amp;#x2F;comparisons&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;ccaf.io&amp;#x2F;cbeci&amp;#x2F;ghg&amp;#x2F;comparisons&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[3] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;2007.03051.pdf&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;arxiv.org&amp;#x2F;pdf&amp;#x2F;2007.03051.pdf&lt;/a&gt;&lt;p&gt;[4] &lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theregister.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;gpt3_carbon_footprint_estimate&amp;#x2F;&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;www.theregister.com&amp;#x2F;2020&amp;#x2F;11&amp;#x2F;04&amp;#x2F;gpt3_carbon_footprint...&lt;/a&gt;</text></comment>
<story><title>The new Bing will happily give you citations for a pile of nonsense</title><url>https://twitter.com/arbuge/status/1626283571294896128</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>kodah</author><text>I&amp;#x27;m not convinced at this point that conversational AI fills any legitimate use cases. For all the pushback crypto got here, it&amp;#x27;s fascinating to see the support that this grift has gotten. The grift being the amount of energy we burn training models juxtaposed to the price people will pay for a nothing burger.&lt;p&gt;Things like Stable Diffusion and DALLE are pretty cool, though a bit novel and toyish at this stage.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>nlnn</author><text>Weirdly, I heard of some genuine use from a family in a pub the other day.&lt;p&gt;Two of the kids were university&amp;#x2F;college age, talking to their parents about it.&lt;p&gt;They were using one of the AI models daily for things like: recipe ideas for food they had in the house, scheduling daily activities, bouncing ideas off for essays, and asking for gift ideas.&lt;p&gt;They understood it wasn&amp;#x27;t much good for facts, but liked the conversational interface as a way to give them ideas or jumping off points for things.</text></comment>