> Because you are not able to pick and choose what humanity tries out, so shall we stop entirely?

I don’t see anything that dictatorial in their suggestion.

There’s clearly something wrong in the current LLM based ecosystem. They take gigawatt-hours to train and digest the entire corpus of the internet to produce a model that writes at, what, the level of an erudite college freshman?

> not focusing on ever increasing the size of ai models, so that we don't need to build all those power-hungry ai training datacenters?

I read the italic bit as not a command to stop, but a suggestion to come up with better algorithms. Which researchers are presumably working on. Hopefully chatGPT & friends don’t suck up all the oxygen.

I think these kinds of things will be solved by market forces.

And there's no reason to ever be bullish on liberal (classical) society's capacity for intentional change.

Human agency doesn't mean shit.

Maybe someone with the knowledge of hindsight in a few generations will say that, yes, we should stop and draw a line in the sand.

We are still used to the idea that we can treat externalities to the systems we build as infinite and boundless, while it is getting increasingly clear that they are not. I am not saying we should stop working on LLMs. I just say we probably should factor in (that means: assign economic value to) downstream consequences of said high energy consumption if we don't wanna destroy our own habitats. And that then would probably lead to a world where LLMs are used for actually important problems instead of furthering the goals of the few who truly profit from surveillance-capitalism.

But hey, let's continue wasting a years worth of energy on training LLMs on cat pictures, they are cute after all.

There will be a point when the answer is "yes".

For example, when we can produce hobby 3d printers for biological viruses. Or DIY kits for nuclear weapons. Or cameras that are the size of a grain of sand and cost only 1 cent. Stuff that some individuals might want, but society will never be ready for.

The argument against current AI progress isn't anti-technology, it's pointing out that these things can have a hugely negative impact that's mostly being shouted down or swept under the rug in the name of "progress". The climate crisis is pretty serious business, and the AI power consumption is making it worse, not better. The risk of huge amounts of unemployment are being mostly handwaved away as "yeah, that's not gonna happen, we always make jobs out of somewhere".

Just yesterday at work I asked it for a Powershell script to upload a local file to S3 and it hallucinated a method. The whole script is like 10 lines. How could it mess that up, but meanwhile it’s about to change the world and be mass adopted?

This is Claude 3 the best model for coding…

After using these models for awhile I think they’re really helpful to get off the ground in terms of coding and writing and to help review coding and writing, but that’s about all I’ve seen so far. It feels like we’re also getting diminishing returns with the current paradigm so we’ll see if I’ll be eating my hat next year, but I really don’t see mass adoption like a search engine.