“But it also takes a lot of energy to train a human,” Altman said. “It takes like 20 years of life and all of the food you eat during that time before you get smart. And not only that, it took the very widespread evolution of the 100 billion people that have ever lived and learned not to get eaten by predators and learned how to figure out science and whatever, to produce you.”

So in his view, the fair comparison is, “If you ask ChatGPT a question, how much energy does it take once its model is trained to answer that question versus a human? And probably, AI has already caught up on an energy efficiency basis, measured that way.”

  • whoisearth@lemmy.ca
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    2 months ago

    Aren’t humans and biological creatures in general found to be extremely efficient with energy? Given the computing power in our brains the fact it runs on so little is amazing no?

    • collar@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      Doesn’t the human brain do what it does on like the same electricity as a lightbulb?

    • UltraMagnus@startrek.website
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      2 months ago

      Yes, it’s disingenuous for him to bring up all the time used for humans to evolve as well. If we’re going to go that far, we also ought to include the energy/time used by the engineers who created ChatGPT, and all the energy used by plants/animals in the evolution leading to those engineers. Not to mention all the time/energy/training of all the people who created the training data over the past few centuries.

      Frankly, at that point, any human artist is more “efficient” than AI - they’re able to master their field in mere decades.

    • REDACTED@infosec.pub
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      2 months ago

      I really don’t think he meant it that way. Think of it like this - if I want to generate some images, my GPU will run at 100% for few minutes. If I want to play cyberpunk, my GPU will run at 100% for hours.

      • UltraMagnus@startrek.website
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        2 months ago

        I think if he meant it that way he would have said that, instead of talking about the energy that humans use and particularly talking about food.

  • Cantaloupe@lemmy.fedioasis.cc
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    2 months ago

    People fucking hate AI now, surely talking about humanity as if they are a bunch of livestock will turn that sentiment right around.

  • SlippiHUD@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    His argument is his computer is more important than other people, and he’s willing to deprive them of resources to death.

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    2 months ago

    Someone on Bluesky pointed out that, even if you ignore the morality of this argument, AI is trained on human content, so if we’re going to start examining the human energy cost, we’ll have to factor in the cost of every single human whose work was used by ChatGPT on top of the data center costs.

    • Spice Hoarder@lemmy.zip
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      2 months ago

      Which makes the fact that their predictive text models are incapable of original thought that much more absurd.

    • dan1101@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      The problem isn’t so much their reckless careless behavior, but that they can get so many people to go along and invest.

  • vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de
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    2 months ago

    creating the “ai” in the first place also required the evolution of those 100 billion people. So by that argument, he was behind before he even started, and it’s impossible to catch up

  • Rose@slrpnk.net
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    2 months ago

    Oh good, the Bitcoin argument.

    “Sure, Bitcoin wastes a lot of energy, but you know what else wastes energy? The Visa payment network.”

    Yeah, but Visa handles six quadrispillion transactions per megawatthour, Bitcoin handles two drug purchases. Not the same results, is it?

    So yeah, training humans takes a lot of energy. But in the end, you get a coherent, capable and well functioning individual. Spend the same energy on training LLMs and you get a system that’ll happily tell you to glue the cheese on pizza or something.

    • Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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      2 months ago

      Not trying to defend the idiotic argument, but feels like more often than not the human output is not what I would call coherent, capable and well functioning.

    • Pricklesthemagicfish@reddthat.com
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      2 months ago

      Yeah because nobody drugs with any other method than bitcoin. Clutch those pearls harder while you wash down your leagal and totally not drugs pharmaceutical pills and alcohol.

    • cmbabul@lemmy.world
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      2 months ago

      It literally warms my heart to know they are all just as temporary as the rest of us. And how afraid they are of being dust in the wind

  • Dr. Moose@lemmy.world
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    2 months ago

    Started from “for good of humanity” and now we’re at “humans use a lot of energy”. Man why does everything have to suck like that.