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Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by AnotherGoodName on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:02PM (#39822237)
"Is code autocompletion and generating random images really worth so much electricity?"

Yes. Very much so.

Some back of enveloping. The worldwide labor market is USD$70trillion. If you save 1% of the time of the worldwide labor market (that's quite reasonable for autocomplete etc right?) that's USD$700billion. A quick Google says the global electricity revenues are USD$255billion.

So if you have a way to save %1 of human labor it's economically worth tripling power generation to make use of it.

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by spenczar5 on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:16PM (#39822372)
Where did that $70T come from? The most obvious objection is that most labor is not desk jobs, so 1% from autocomplete seems very unreasonable to me, but I don’t know how it breaks out in dollars. Maybe your source says that?
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by AnotherGoodName on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:26PM (#39822453)
It's admittedly super rough. I googled worldwide labor market and got 3.5billion workers. I then Googled average global earnings, $20k. However i'll admit to a mistake. The second number appears incorrect and it seems it should have been ~$10k based on the following: https://www.zippia.com/advice/average-income-worldwide/#:~:t....

Still i think the point should stand no matter how precise we get here. The cost of labor absolutely dwarfs the cost of electricity. That was what i wanted to hit on while completely acknowledging the numbers are rough.

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by gmm1990 on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:12PM (#39822340)
Not sure that llm autocomplete is so much better than autocomplete using more energy efficient algorithms to make a noticeable difference in productivity.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by pants2 on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:16PM (#39822376)
Great, then you won't buy the $20/mo copilot package and save energy!
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by bamboozled on Monday March 25, 2024 @08:05PM (#39822750)
The world doesn’t work this way, you have to use it to stay competitive. Even if you don’t like it.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by Turing_Machine on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @01:28AM (#39824517)
Hmm... so it's so bad that you might as well just use old-school autocorrect, and so good that you have to use it to remain competitive, at the same time?
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by bamboozled on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @02:30AM (#39824786)
You're making that claim.

Our company buys it for us to "stay ahead", whether we use it or not, we're paying for it.

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by Turing_Machine on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @12:47PM (#39829997)
> You're making that claim.

No, that is literally your claim combined with the claim of the original poster.

In your first post you claimed you "had" to use it. Now you say it's optional?

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by gmueckl on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:16PM (#39822373)
But that is exactly what GP is criticizing: just looking at the $$$. All of us here know that the environmental impact of electric energy generation is externalized and global. If we were to price that in fairly, the labor might well be cheaper!
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by dieortin on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:11PM (#39822327)
ChatGPT cannot autocomplete a house, or the extraction of minerals from a mine.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by AnotherGoodName on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:16PM (#39822374)
The jaquard loom and steam engine can't do those things either. A revolution occurs when a technology saves even a fraction of worldwide labor costs. That's all it needs to do to be literally revolutionary.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by krainboltgreene on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:20PM (#39822414)
Steam engines were literally created specifically to help with mining, this is so hilariously telling of people into this hype.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by pixl97 on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:49PM (#39822613)
And have you studied anything into modern mining yourself? Mines are starting to convert fleets into self driving trucks. Capabilities like image/video recognition that LLMs can do improve their identification and alert systems.

Modern AI is a whole lot more than just shitting out spam on the internet.

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by peteradio on Monday March 25, 2024 @09:33PM (#39823406)
> Mines are starting to convert fleets into self driving trucks.

What mines?

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by pixl97 on Monday March 25, 2024 @10:07PM (#39823601)
Canadian mine has a partial fleet

https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/sudbury/cote-gold-mine-automa...

Canadian oil sands operation using Autonomous haul trucks.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Z9w-mUoUsY

This mine in Arizona is in progress at this time.

https://im-mining.com/2023/09/15/freeport-says-bagdad-to-hav...

Rio Tinto says they have 130 autonomous units.

https://www.riotinto.com/en/mn/about/innovation/automation

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by krainboltgreene on Tuesday March 26, 2024 @03:42AM (#39825112)
To be clear we're talking about less than 200 trucks by my count, most of which were built in 2013-2016, the Baghdad Arizona mine still hasn't deployed anything yet as far as I know (I asked people in that area). None of this has anything to do with code completion or image generation and LLMs don't even do anything semi-related to vision. That's entirely beyond the scope of how they're designed.

It is not surprising to me anymore the threads that get pulled to justify this insane hype, but what does shock me is that it's going on 8 months of the same very tired and thin arguments that get smaller and smaller in their claims the more questions you ask.

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by xxpor on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:24PM (#39822443)
Global electricity generation revenues are only $255 billion? Amazon/Google/Apple have greater revenue than the worldwide electricity generation sector?
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by AnotherGoodName on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:28PM (#39822470)
I just Googled these numbers quickly but yes it seems correct.

"In 2021, the global electricity transmission and distribution market generated some 255.6 billion U.S. dollars in revenue, up from 248.5 billion U.S. dollars in the previous year"

https://www.statista.com/statistics/1350454/forecast-electri....

Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by xxpor on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:31PM (#39822490)
That's just delivery AFAICT, not generation.
Re:As AI booms, land near nuclear power plants becomes hot r... by colechristensen on Monday March 25, 2024 @07:45PM (#39822583)
You’re off by about a factor of ten.

Global electricity production is about 30 PWh per year and wholesale electricity costs are about $100 / MWh around the world. That’s about $3T. (Numbers are rough, don’t get pedantic)