AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50%

Re:AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% by botanical on Friday April 04, 2025 @06:14AM (#43580231)

It's such madness that all this resource usage is for LLMs that are barely useful (at least for me). So many billions in resources wasted for machine learning systems that mimic human speech, it's not intelligent in any sense.

Now we see models showing the user it's "thinking" as some sort of intelligent agent, when really, ploys like that is to prop up the AI sector's stock price.

Surely LLMs in this form can't be the future of AGI?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% by spacebanana7 on Friday April 04, 2025 @09:30AM (#43582091)

I find LLMs to be very useful at doing things I could do myself, but don't really want to.

Like making charts out of CSV data, writing cute postcard messages to my girlfriend, or passive aggressive complaints to my landlord.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% by dehugger on Sunday April 06, 2025 @02:59PM (#43603975)

You don't even want to write your own post card messages to your girlfriend? I bet she would feel really loved and cared for to find out you outsourced romance to a chatbot.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:AI bots strain Wikimedia as bandwidth surges 50% by lxgr on Friday April 04, 2025 @01:35PM (#43585517)

LLMs are much better at summarizing textual content or extracting specific pieces of information from it rather than answering complicated/niche queries from their weights alone, and that's likely (part of) what is happening here (i.e. fetching Wikipedia articles and cross-checking before answering).

Arguably this is using Wikipedia exactly for what it's designed for, although in an unexpectedly resource-intensive way. I bet just adding a web query cache for most frequently visited URLs on the side of the LLM provider could mitigate most of the negative effects here.

[ Parent | on HN ]