[minasmorath]

I took it as more of a recognition of the downsides to LLM tech that the hype train tends to ignore, as well as the legal / moral / ethical gray areas that exist in both training those models and determining who is liable for what they output.

[stavros]

I don't know, this sounds weird:

> While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

[minasmorath]

How is that weird? Current energy consumption levels for LLMs are definitely problematic. That's not to say they can't improve, but at the moment it's definitely bad. The estimate of ongoing power consumption for Google's AI summary feature, if it was made available for every search result, is roughly equivalent to the consumption level of the entire country of Ireland. That's not awesome given most of the world is not powered by renewable energy sources.

[stavros]

Don't look at what it says, look at how it's written:

> While they do this, they also use vast amounts of energy and are happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them which is a problem we’ve seen before in the field of cryptocurrencies.

"Vast amounts of energy", "happy using all the GPUs you can throw at them", and then the random cryptocurrency reference to evoke all the bad stuff associated with those.

[minasmorath]

That's how a lot of folks write when they want to make a shorthand comparison and they trust their readers to understand what they're doing. The author is making a comparison of the current cost / benefit of LLM tech to the cost / benefit of Crypto. I don't necessarily agree with that comparison, but using an evocative writing style that can say quite a lot with very few words isn't a problem to me, especially given what this post is intended to convey.

Edit: I do think you're making a fair observation, I just feel there are a few reasons not to draw too strong of a conclusion from it