It would be great if I had a bathtub full of ice cream as well, and if we all lived in a world overflowing with love, respect and joy for all living things. Until then, I'm happy that these kinds of incredible tools are (and increasingly will be) be in more of our hands for close to free. Upwards and onwards!

What is a little contradictory is that designing a system to use less resources can increases the number of people fine tuning models so that the final result can be a net global increase in the total energy use. A hypothetical goal could be to reuse fine tuning, that is designing a knowledge graph in which you fine tuning from a previously fine tuned model (like dynamic programming, save the result of previous computations). Lora allow us to store the small matrices with low cost.

They are using gaming GPUs. If you want to complain about a waste of natural resources there seems to be a lot of people playing games...

> Using so much energy to play with language models is a waste of resources.

Why do you get to decide what's wasteful and what's useful?

We have more energy than we could ever hope to use from the sun and from nuclear. The solution isn't telling people they're wasting precious energy that you would put to better use. Just build more nuclear reactors and more solar.

Also, whoever is married, please for the love of god merge your facebook accounts. It takes up too much space on the internet.

Beats crypto in my opinion. I feel like there's a sliding scale for this stuff, and playing with language models is genuinely interesting, though it's harder to predict what the real benefits will be.

I feel certain there will be great benefit, but not in the way AI hypesters expect there to be.

The point in the article is to use less resources. So, yes?

I hate this more recent doomer logic. Who is the arbiter of deciding whats a waste and not a waste? Why use such a basic and uncompelling narrative of telling how others should live their lives? I try to be thoughtful of my purchases and conserve my own resources and happy to talk about it but telling people that "doing x is a waste of resources" is a fools errand. Humanity has always progressed when in a collective group, it won't slow down now even though some individuals might drop out of it. I don't know what the future holds, collectively we will continue to progress and I see the bright side of all the recent momentum in renewable energy and the focus on making systems more efficient.

Not the first time this character has popped up here on HN.

"I write full-time and try to convince people of the danger of AI and advanced technology."

Running a powerful GPU at full load using coal-generated energy causes two orders of magnitude less emissions than flying on an airliner (per passenger). If you ever flown anywhere in your life, I don't think you can climb on that high horse.

I started reading your blog linked from your profile. I was disappointed that you used so much energy to play with language by writing up thoughts and hosting them on the internet. Seems like a waste of resources. Why do you think you have the right to burn all that carbon just so you can share your thoughts with the world? Why not just save electricity and take a walk through nature? That's how I think you should use your resources. I think I know better than you about how you should use energy. I think you should have to follow my ideology about energy use.