Comment on Analog computing is undergoing a resurgence
FishFace@lemmy.world 6 months ago
Relating this to carbon emissions is absurd. Your phone’s maximum power consumption is about 25W, of which sensors are a tiny, minuscule fraction. Running your phone at 25W for an entire year would allow you to drive a typical petrol car doing 40mpg for 250 miles on the same energy budget.
Reducing sensor power usage is good, but not for this reason.
There is a connection, but I don’t think it’s a satisfying one.
There’s some thought that the weights behind neural networks would take less power consumption if they were on analog chips. So yeah, it’s for LLMs to get bigger. Reducing CO2 emissions by not doing LLM slop is apparently off the table.
Reducing CO2 emissions by not doing LLM slop is apparently off the table.
Not to be argumentative, but has this ever been something the consumer market has done with an emerging “core” technology? I don’t see how this was ever realistically on the table.
AI slop is an unfortunate fact of life at this point. If it’s inevitable, we may as well make it as not terrible as possible.
That’s what regulations are for. We’ve been asking for CO2 regulations for decades, but the argument is almost always “we can’t reduce dirty energy production until we have enough power to replace it all without downscaling.” Then they invent stuff like crypto to drain any excess power. That crashed, then AI suddenly appears to drain it. I’m convinced it’s all a conspiracy to keep dirty energy companies profitable. The timing is just too convenient.
That’s what I mean though. Convincing users to not use LLMs as a way to reduce CO2 is a fools errand. It will never work. So we should focus on something that can actually move the needle, like speeding up the move to a fully green grid.
Nothing inevitable about it. People aren’t going to be running local models en masse; that will be about as popular as self-hosting Internet services. People are largely reliant on centralized datacenter models, and those will shut down as the bubble pops.
This is how I understood it too.
macaw_dean_settle@lemmy.world 6 months ago
*gasoline or diesel. You cannot use petroleum as it needs to be refined.
Capricorn_Geriatric@lemmy.world 6 months ago
‘Petrol’ is british for gasoline. No one will be driving around on Vaseline.
FishFace@lemmy.world 6 months ago
en.wiktionary.org/wiki/petrol
gnu@lemmy.zip 6 months ago
Petrol and gasoline are the same thing, it’s just different terminology.