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A comment on Digital collectibles / NFTs on Instagram are winding down. Parent comment

Re:Digital collectibles / NFTs on Instagram are winding down by currymj on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:23AM (#35502062)
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.

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Re:Digital collectibles / NFTs on Instagram are winding down by inconceivable on Sunday April 09, 2023 @08:50AM (#35502243)
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.
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Re:Digital collectibles / NFTs on Instagram are winding down by seadan83 on Sunday April 09, 2023 @11:13AM (#35503490)
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.
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