[jrflowers]

>1 unit of damage, and another thing that causes 100.000 units of damage, then for all intents and purposes the thing that produces 1 unit of damage is irrelevant

You make a good point. A problem is only a real problem if you can’t find a bigger thing that makes it look small by comparison. For example, the worldwide concrete industry creates more co2 than beef does so there is no reason to stop eating beef if you enjoy it.

Now I know that some might say that “all of this is cumulative” or “the material problems that stem from entrenched industries is actually a reason not to invent completely novel wasteful things rather than a justification for them” but in reality only two things are true: only the biggest problem is real, and the only problem is definitely some other guy’s doing. If I waste x energy and my neighbor wastes y amount, a goal of reducing (x+y) is oppressive whereas a goal where I just need to try to keep x lower than y feels a lot nicer.

https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2019/feb/25/concrete-the-...

https://www.chathamhouse.org/sites/default/files/publication...

[AnimalMuppet]

Human energy, attention, and effort are finite. Put the effort where it will have the biggest effect.

[jrflowers]

I agree. Humans have been eating meat and doing construction for the entire history of civilization, they are not the sort of things that could be affected by posting online. LLMs on the other hand are new, largely in the hands of a small handful of companies, and a couple of those companies are bleeding cash in such a way that they might actually respond to consumer pressure. It is cynical to compare them to things that we know will not change as a justification for a blanket excuse for them.

Seeing as these models being wasteful is integral to the revenue of companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, the more people that tell them that the right business strategy is to start perpetually building data centers and power plants, the less incentive they have to build models that run efficiently on consumer hardware.

[Dylan16807]

You're writing a whole lot of words that completely ignore they already gave a solution to things being cumulative.

Skip meat for one day, use AI for a year, come out ahead.

[jrflowers]

They just suggested a different bike shed — one for the purpose of their argument won’t ever get fixed. J-pb’s point is that running a bunch of generators 24/7 in Memphis is fine because people eat meat. Inefficient LLMs in the real world are okay because people could theoretically become vegan but have not. It’s just a thought experiment

https://futurism.com/elon-musk-memphis-illegal-generators

[Dylan16807]

If something costs too much, and you find a way to completely pay for it, that's not bikeshedding.

And it's not a thought experiment. It's a very real suggestion. If you're worried about the resource cost from your personal use, doing something to 100% offset it lets you stop worrying.

> become vegan

For one day per year. Replacing a day you would have otherwise eaten meat. That is an extremely attainable action for anyone that cares enough about LLM resource use enough to strongly consider avoiding them. It's not something that "will not change".

By the way, your goal of running efficiently on consumer hardware isn't as great as it sounds. One of the best ways to improve efficiency is batching multiple requests, and datacenter hardware generally uses more efficient nodes and runs at more efficient clock speeds. There's an efficiency sweet spot where models are moderately too big to run at home.

And it really undermines your argument when you throw in this stupid strawman about elon's toxic generators. You know j-pb was talking about typical datacenter resource use and not that. Get that insulting claim out of here.

[jrflowers]

>It's a very real suggestion

It is only a “very real suggestion” if you believe that your argument might be effective.

Do you believe that “skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year” will have a climate impact?

Because if not then you agree with me that in this case theoretical vegans are just being used to justify more real consumption, not less

>stupid strawman about elon's toxic generators

They exist in the real world, right now. It is a real phenomenon and no matter how many vegans I imagine it’s still there. I’m not really clear on why the real thing that’s really happening is a strawman unless you think that the existence of that system is so bad that it undermines your position. Even then it wouldn’t be a strawman though, just a thing that doesn’t support your position that using LLMs is categorically fine because you can picture a vegan in your head

[Dylan16807]

> Do you believe that “skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year” will have a climate impact?

If "use LLMs for a year" is enough to count as having a climate impact (negatively), then yes I believe "skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year" is enough to count (positively).

I'd be tempted to write off both of those, but the whole point of your argument is to consider LLM resource use important, so I'm completely accepting that for the sake of the above argument.

There are no theoretical vegans involved.

And the suggestion doesn't even involve vegans, unless there's a massive contingent of americans that only eat meat one day per year that I wasn't aware of.

And to get at what I think is your core objection: The fact that people can do this isn't being used to let companies off the hook. If only 2% of LLM users set up a meat skipping day, then LLM companies are only 2% let off the hook.

But at the same time let's keep a proportional sense of how big the hook is.

> They exist in the real world, right now. It is a real phenomenon

The strawman is you accusing people of supporting those generators.

> your position that using LLMs is categorically fine

I didn't say that.

[jrflowers]

>If "use LLMs for a year" is enough to count as having a climate impact (negatively), then yes I believe "skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year" is enough to count (positively).

Sorry, I should have clarified. In this case I meant “argument” as a thing that leads real people to either understand or agree with your position, not the construction of an idea in your mind.

With that in mind, do you think that “skip meat for a day use LLMs for a year” will convince enough real people, in real life, to not eat meat, that it offsets the emissions from LLM use?

Like imagine the future.

Since LLM use is a new category of energy use, you would have to convince people that haven’t already been convinced to skip meat by animal cruelty, health, philosophy, or existing climate concerns. People that were vegan before LLMs became popular obviously don’t count. The group of people that resisted decades of all that messaging will now make a meaningful adjustment to their consumption to cancel that out — and there will be enough of these new part time/full time vegans that it offsets the entire chat bot industry’s energy usage.

Do you imagine that being what happens?

If not it’s just somebody advocating for increased consumption in real life by invoking imaginary vegans.

As somebody that’s spent years as a vegan I am incredibly wary of “vegans can recruit” as a pitch. I’ve only ever heard that from people that have never tried to recruit in earnest or charlatans. Like I’ve mostly heard that from people that are not, never have been, and have no interest in being vegan.

Edit:

>The strawman is you accusing people of supporting those generators.

That’s not what a strawman is and it’s not an accusation, it’s an observation. If you say “I want subscription based online batched mega-high-compute language models” you are advocating for that industry, and those generators are part of it. Saying you feel that they’re somehow special and different because they’re icky does not make them any different from the thing that you say is necessarily the future. That you want!

[j-pb]

Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep eating meat buddy.

[jrflowers]

> Whatever you need to tell yourself to keep eating meat buddy.

I’m not the one that brought up moralizing or food. I can’t really comment on your relationship with your diet but it kind of seems like you saw somebody mention power usage and unprompted shared “well I don’t eat meat or cheese or yogurt” so I guess keep that up while you use enough energy to power your home to write some code slower than you would without it?

https://www.infoworld.com/article/4020931/ai-coding-tools-ca...

I gave a little more detail to my point about climate impact here

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44654552