this has always struck me as a weird argument. one could make a very rough comparison to the energy required to run a gaming PC for an hour, and the energy (inference + amortizing the training run) to run a conversation with ChatGPT for an hour, they're probably order-of-magnitude comparable. But there is no serious concern by anyone for the climate impact of PC gaming. It's just fundamentally that computers require electricity to run.

If the dreams of companies making large sequence models do come to pass, and they really do scale up to where training and running large sequence models is a significant portion of world electricity usage, then of course it becomes a real problem, but the same would be true for any large electricity-intensive industry.

the people writing this FUD have never seen the inside of a datacenter or understand how anything really works. they're just FUDsters, professional shit-stirring stooges. it doesn't matter if the tech in question is total garbage or the next coming of the internet.

It's a flawed argument. Consider the profit equation (revenue minus costs). The argument ignores that crypto is designed to have a minimum in cost (and that minimum is high). For most other computing applications, compute cost is just a cost and does not have a fixed lower bound. In other words, crypto is designed to be an energy use competition, AI is not.

i'm getting downvoted because we're in an NFT thread and people think i'm pro-NFT (lmao. lol. etc.) instead of anti-dipshit-FUDster "tech journalists".

There's one crucial difference between AI and Bitcoin when it comes to energy usage.

With AI there are strong incentives to make everything more efficient and use less energy. This is already happening: people are finding ways to run AI models on less powerful hardware (see LLaMA etc), and AI providers like OpenAI have managed to run things. Lee efficiently - that's presumably how they could drop the price of an API call by 1/10th for GPT3.5 compared to GPT3.

With Bitcoin efficiencies don't actually help, because the entire system is designed as a competition. The person who burns more energy wins more value. If the tech becomes more efficient the miners just increase their activity, so energy usage doesn't meaningfully decrease.

I'll agree with you on Bitcoin mining specifically, but other aspects of cryptocurrencies I wouldn't. For example, the Lightning Network is a layer built on top of Bitcoin is all about increased speed and efficiency.

Then there's Ethereum, which just completed a major upgrade to convert its Proof of Work method to Proof of Stake and now uses a negligible amount of energy compared to other things, as shown in this article on their site[1].

And there are newer cryptocurrencies like Solana, that started as proof of stake to begin with and can handle at least 8500[2] transactions per second (compared to only 4 transactions per second with the much older bitcoin, and 30 transactions per second with Ethereum).

That's a hell of a lot more efficient as well, and also seems to be more efficient than ChatGPT is per query, as Solana's energy use per transaction is 3,290 Joules, or 0.00091 kWh[3], versus the conservative estimate of ChatGPT (3.5)'s estimated energy usage on this article [4] of 0.00198 kWh, or 7,128 Joules.

So I think that overall, crypto is still incentivized to become more efficient. Bitcoin is not, as more people care about the security provided by proof of work there than they do about energy efficiency, which is unfortunate.

[1]: https://ethereum.org/en/energy-consumption/

[2]: https://crypto.news/solana-transactions-per-second-hit-an-al...

[3]: https://solana.com/news/solanas-energy-use-report-september-...

[4]: https://towardsdatascience.com/chatgpts-electricity-consumpt...

That's why I said Bitcoin.