[Sophira]

I get that this is technically interesting, for certain, but the sheer amount of energy and associated global warming risk needed to do something with >=99% accuracy that we've been able to do easily for decades with a guaranteed 100% accuracy seems to me to be wasteful to the extreme.

[Lerc]

What would be an acceptable amount of energy to spend on something that someone has done in a different manner before? Would you rather we stick with all of the current known ways to do things.

Does this boil down to a condemnation of all scientific endeavours if they use resources?

Would it change things if the people who did it enjoyed themselves? Would they have spent more energy playing a first person shooter to get the same degree of enjoyment?

How do you make the calculation of the worth of a human endeavour? Perhaps the greater question is why are you making a calculation of the worth of a human endeavour.

[mcdeltat]

Ok I don't really care either way but to play devil's advocate, what exactly is this specific challenge of adding numbers with a transformer model demonstrating/advancing? The pushpack from people, albeit a little aggressive, does have a grain of truth. We're demonstrating that a model which uses preexisting addition instructions can add numbers? I mean yeah you can do it with arbitrarily few parameters because you don't need a machine learning model at all. Not exactly groundbreaking so I reckon the debate is fair.

Now if you said this proof of addition opens up some other interesting avenue of research, sure.

[coolsunglasses]

>Hacker News

not any more, eh?

[userbinator]

Because it's fun. Life is meant to be enjoyed.

Those who worry about an imaginary risk and live their lives in constant fear have turned into nothing more than machines enslaved by propaganda.

[mapontosevenths]

> the sheer amount of energy and associated global warming risk

I think that's one very good reason to make them more efficient, and that's part of the point of contests like this one.

[tovej]

Making things more efficient in a market setting just means they're used more. Which means we eventually use more resources with efficient methods, not less.

[thereisnospork]

You need to recalibrate your sense of scale if you think that this is a geologically relevant usage of energy.

[nradov]

Wait until you see the quantum computer that it takes to factor the integer 15.