The fact that people are downvoting you en masse shows how important it is we spread the word about this. Because you’re 100% right.
The large majority of data centers used for AI use renewable power on a separate, private grid. Distributing that workload across our aging consumer grid would be an unmitigated disaster.
Nah, even that won’t be. Because most of this workload is going to run on laptops and tablets and phones and it’s going to run at lower qualities where the power cost per task is very manageable on hardware accelerated devices that will do it more efficiently.
The heavy load is going to stay on farms because nobody is going to wait half an hour and waste 20% of their battery making a picture of a cute panda eating a sandwich. They’ll run heavily quantized language models as interfaces to basic apps and search engines and it’ll do basic upscaling for video and other familiar tasks like that.
I’m not trying to be obtusely equidistant, it’s just that software developers are neither wizards that will bring about the next industrial revolution because nobody else is smart enough… nor complete morons that can’t balance the load of a task across a server and a client.
But it’s true that they’ll push as much of that compute and energy cost onto the user as possible, as a marketing ploy to sell new devices, if nothing else. And it’s true that on the aggregate that will make the tasks less efficient and waste more heat and energy.
Also, I’m not sure how downvoted I am. Interoperable social networks are a great idea in concept, but see above about software developers. I assume the up/downvote comes from rolling a d20 and adding it to whatever the local votes are.
The fact that people are downvoting you en masse shows how important it is we spread the word about this. Because you’re 100% right.
The large majority of data centers used for AI use renewable power on a separate, private grid. Distributing that workload across our aging consumer grid would be an unmitigated disaster.
Nah, even that won’t be. Because most of this workload is going to run on laptops and tablets and phones and it’s going to run at lower qualities where the power cost per task is very manageable on hardware accelerated devices that will do it more efficiently.
The heavy load is going to stay on farms because nobody is going to wait half an hour and waste 20% of their battery making a picture of a cute panda eating a sandwich. They’ll run heavily quantized language models as interfaces to basic apps and search engines and it’ll do basic upscaling for video and other familiar tasks like that.
I’m not trying to be obtusely equidistant, it’s just that software developers are neither wizards that will bring about the next industrial revolution because nobody else is smart enough… nor complete morons that can’t balance the load of a task across a server and a client.
But it’s true that they’ll push as much of that compute and energy cost onto the user as possible, as a marketing ploy to sell new devices, if nothing else. And it’s true that on the aggregate that will make the tasks less efficient and waste more heat and energy.
Also, I’m not sure how downvoted I am. Interoperable social networks are a great idea in concept, but see above about software developers. I assume the up/downvote comes from rolling a d20 and adding it to whatever the local votes are.