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by ajkjk 406 days ago
Man it is weird that the word for that is "harvesting".
3 comments

I had that weird moment a few days ago learning that word is also used when you slaughter a (non human) animal:

"The chickens are harvest when they’re 32 days old"

Let’s sprout some semence in the cow (or not).

If that sounds weird, the term around here for butchering chickens is "dressing" them, as in, "We're going to dress chickens today."
The term for slaughtering pigs around here is 'turning them off' - all attempts to disconnect from the reality of what is happening.
Cognitive dissonance really is required to keep our “warm fuzzy empathic friendly” self image while simultaneously being ruthlessly pragmatic cold blooded killers when it suits us.
Pretty accurate though!
I don't think so? To me 'harvest' implies that the crop is destroyed afterwards.
We "harvest" all sorts of tree-grown products without killing the trees.
Similar for Asparagus.
Just wait till these robot maximalists figure out that a pile of oxygen, carbon, hydrogen, and nitrogen is much cheaper than robots made out of steel and carbon fiber.
I mean, they haven't glommed onto the daily experience of giving a kid a snickers bar and asking them a question is cheaper than building a nuclear reactor to power GPT4o levels of LLM...
If we could directly convert the food energy of a Snickers bar to electricity we could easily power AI. A Snickers bar has 250 kcal, which is 1000 kJ or about 250 grams of TNT.[https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=250+kcal+in+joule] chatgpt-4 uses 3.6 kJ to 36 kJ per query so you could get potentially hundreds of queries on a single Snickers bar.

We only need a way to harness the power of the human body. Maybe we put people in VR for fun while using their body heat to power the AI.

But then eventually you need Keanu Reeves to put boundary conditions on the AI
I was watching The Matrix Revolutions last night with my 14-year old. At one point, he told me "hey, that looks like ... Keanu Reeves"
TNT and other explosives have relatively little energy per kg compared to eg petrol or snickers.

That's explosives are chemicals selected / designed to be able to release their chemical energy really quickly and without needing any external oxidizer (because harvesting atmospheric oxygen would be too slow). That focus obviously leads to compromises in other areas, like energy density.

The snickers bar allows more than a single query for the human though
Temporarily, on the margin. A human would need multiple Snickers bars per day to survive, and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.

Also no human is anywhere close to being as knowledgeable and skilled as LLMs at all the things at the same time, so it hardly even compares.

> and can't survive on Snickers bars alone for more than couple days or weeks.

lol, the spoiled times we live in that you think this. The human body is capable of surviving on very little.

A thing with protein, fat and sugar would sustain you for incredible amounts of time. Many many months if not years.

days? Pretty sure I could survive at least a couple years off snicker bars
I don't think I could write lengthy responses to hundreds of questions on a singular Snickers bar. I would need multiple.
They're fully aware of the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans at scale in general, and this includes power efficiency too. Meanwhile, what is not getting comparably better is robotics. This leads to obvious conclusion about natural order of things and division of labor: computers are for thinking, humans are for doing manual labor.
> the obvious fact that LLMs are getting better at reasoning than humans

I wanted to say that you were wrong, that LLMs can't reason and so it certainly isn't an obvious truth that they do it better than humans, but when I asked AI if LLMs can reason it told me that they can't which (while still not being reasoned by the LLM) seems to support the spirit of your claim since it gave a correct answer while you (a presumed human that can reason) got it wrong.

We might be elevating the importance of reasoning too much because us humans need to use it to solve many difficult problems. But if intuition was stronger, conscious/explicit/logical reasoning might not be needed. Didn't the famous mathemetician Ramanujan say that God gave him his answers in his dreams? That sounds like really powerful intuition like an LLM. Us humans can already solve a lot of incredibly complex problems intuitively, but they're quite domain-specific, like for spatial navigation and social interaction.
Anthropologist Gregory Bateson predicted we'll know machines are conscious when we ask a question and the computer responds, "That reminds me of a story."
How are you defining “reasoning”?
That seems to be the hangup. I have to use a definition that would put it on equal footing to what we do as humans since that's the comparison being made.

Computers and software can be said to "understand", "think", and "reason" in their own way and informally people have always used those words in that context. Recently, software which has been trained on human-reasoned output is producing text that mimics reasoning well enough that it can be confused for the real thing, but nobody has been able to show that any reasoning (as a human reasons) is what's occurring.

Well, don't blame me, I voted for Kodos...
Kodos the Executioner, or the Rigelian from The Simpsons?
I’m excited at our future where we’re mind-stapled together to be used as meat for our AI overlords to enact their obtuse plans.
If a person costs $100K/year to employ, at $0.10/kWh that would buy 1 GWh/year, or a steady power of over 100 kW.
To all of you complaining about LLMs hallucinating, do try to give the same prompt to a kid on a sugar rush and let me know if you're getting more reliable responses.