Excerpt:
I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas.
I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.
Being useful as a “grammar checker on steroids” is not good enough to justify the environmental impact AI require to run. Tf you on about.
Training a model which is good for a long time isn’t the same as running a model. You can run the full 768B Deepseek on a $2k PC with no GPU.
The current AI server energy use is the “factory” for llms. It’s like looking at the costs to build a solar plant and declaring that solar is dirtier than oil while ignoring the entire lifecycle.
It’s certainly a better use of computing resources than the hundreds of millions of home users burning terrawatts with their 3080’s (or worse) playing Call of Duty and Fortnight.