All I can think about is how much power this takes, how many un-renewable resources have been consumed to make this happen. Sure, we all need a funny thing here or there in our lives. But is this stuff really worth it?
Luckily we live in a society where its ok to use power for personal pleasure, such as running an A/C in the summer which accounts for much more electricity use than LLM inference.
The actual energy usage is probably not a big deal comparatively. But the attention / economic energy is absolutely a big deal and an increasingly farcical one.
I think the market is just waiting for the next Big Think to come around (crypto, VR, etc.) and the attention obsession will move on.
Trivial in the grand scheme of things. There are much larger problems to attend to - if worrying about the cost and impact of AI tokens was a problem, we'd be living in a utopia.
Literally pick any of the top 100 most important problems you could have any impact on, none of them are going to be AI cost/impact related. Some might be "what do we do when jobs are gone" AI related. But this is trivial- you could run the site itself on a raspberry pi.
I think this is a strange, and honestly worrying, stance.
Just because there are worse problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't care about less-worse problems (this is a logical fallacy, I think it's called relative privation).
Further, there is an extremely limited number of problems that I, personally, can have any impact on. That doesn't mean that problems that I don't have any impact on, are not problems, and I couldn't worry about.
My country is being filled up with data centers. Since the rise of LLMs, the pace at which they are being built has increased tremendously. Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings. If we were using technology only (or primarily) for useful things, we would need maybe 1/10th of the data centers, and my immediate living environment would benefit from it.
Finally, the site could perhaps be run on a Raspberry Pi. But the site itself is not the interesting part, it's the LLMs using it.
You are consuming non-renewable resources by reading this on your device and posting a comment for your entertainment.
At least with Moltbook, it is an interesting study for inter-agent communications. Perhaps an internal Moltbook is what will pave the path towards curing cancer or other bleeding-edge research.
With your comment, you are just wasting non-renewable resources just for your brain to feel good.
tomasphan|1 month ago
https://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/faq.php?id=1174&t=1
unknown|1 month ago
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chneu|1 month ago
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keiferski|1 month ago
I think the market is just waiting for the next Big Think to come around (crypto, VR, etc.) and the attention obsession will move on.
observationist|1 month ago
Literally pick any of the top 100 most important problems you could have any impact on, none of them are going to be AI cost/impact related. Some might be "what do we do when jobs are gone" AI related. But this is trivial- you could run the site itself on a raspberry pi.
HendrikHensen|1 month ago
Just because there are worse problems, doesn't mean we shouldn't care about less-worse problems (this is a logical fallacy, I think it's called relative privation).
Further, there is an extremely limited number of problems that I, personally, can have any impact on. That doesn't mean that problems that I don't have any impact on, are not problems, and I couldn't worry about.
My country is being filled up with data centers. Since the rise of LLMs, the pace at which they are being built has increased tremendously. Everywhere I go, there are these huge, ugly, energy and water devouring behemoths of buildings. If we were using technology only (or primarily) for useful things, we would need maybe 1/10th of the data centers, and my immediate living environment would benefit from it.
Finally, the site could perhaps be run on a Raspberry Pi. But the site itself is not the interesting part, it's the LLMs using it.
000ooo000|1 month ago
thegreatpeter|1 month ago
eZinc|1 month ago
At least with Moltbook, it is an interesting study for inter-agent communications. Perhaps an internal Moltbook is what will pave the path towards curing cancer or other bleeding-edge research.
With your comment, you are just wasting non-renewable resources just for your brain to feel good.