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Comment by EA-3167 | Hacker News Reader

Plus there's the reality that all of this mediocre capability requires VAST inputs of energy that are totally unsustainable.

I've said it here before and will again, AI is just the pivot from crypto that props up NVIDIA prices and lets tech bros speculate on a market that simply will never materialize.

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As somebody who recently used Claude Opus to help quickly and affordably solve complex problems in 3D design work (OpenSCAD) while designing a marketable product, I have my doubts about your analogy. Prior to the availability of affordable and accessible AI, I could have taken some Bitcoin and paid somebody smarter than me to help me with this work, but I guarantee it would have been less economically viable, both in terms of financial cost to me and in terms of energy consumption costs.

If you need it to do small standard tasks that normally requires an expert, then these AI can often solve them for you.

If however you need an expert to do a longer term project, then these AI can not solve them for you. It does replace some jobs as you say, but most people don't work on short term project consultation so overall it doesn't matter much.

> and in terms of energy consumption costs.

Did you include the cost of training the model? I'm pretty sure the total investments that goes into AI today way outspend the cost of such small consultation gigs that AI can replace currently. Customer support is the biggest moneymaker so far and even that is hard to do right with customers suing over lies from the AI bots.

As expected, the replies to this comment are about the alleged speculated or anecdotal utility of "crypto" or "AI" to solve problems. However the replies fail to address the substance of the comment: money, the personal enrichment of a selected group of individuals. The motivation behind these "innovations" is money, not problem-solving. As the comment indicates, "AI" actually _creates_ (not solves) _real_ (not speculative) problems for which its proponents have no solutions. Both "crypto" and "AI" seem to evade cost versus benefit analysis because the costs are real while benefits are pure speculation. As their proponents enrich themselves on what amount to pre-payments for something that may never be delivered, the public is expected to believe that the benefits will arrive "real soon" and will convincingly exceed the enormous costs society is now paying and will continue to pay.

AI is legit, but you are right that currently it's too expensive and being propped up by investments paid for in compute from cloud providers. We're making rapid progress in bringing the compute requirements of high level models down though, and eventually we'll get over this need to make supermodels and start making distilled models for specific tasks, which will provide the benefits without the drawbacks of all knowing models.

I agree, AI/ML can be very useful.

Wait until you hear how much energy a human worker consumes...

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