We’ve seen an incredibly powerful technology follow multiple exponential curves in its capability, but we’re supposed to ask why we’re telling ourselves “stories” if we think about what will happen if that technology continues to follow the curves it has been following without sign of hitting any walls?

Is AGI certain? No. But there’s currently no specific reason to believe it isn’t coming in the next few years.

How long could a public figure have a hidden address? It doesn't seem practical.

I wanted one of these so much.

All data centers in aggregate (AI and all other uses) use about 1.5% of electricity production, which itself is about 20% of total energy use.

So when people are focusing on AI above all other energy uses, it doesn't really paint an accurate picture of what's going on.

You can split up every single industries/topics/&c. into "yeah but it only use 1.5% of energy", "yeah but it only produces 1.5% of the co2"

Guess what happens when you add them up...

This kind of logic only works if the percentages for each industry are all equally that small, so you can treat them as all equally bad, but they are absolutely not.

They're all that small if you split them as OP did. Just look at "transportation", it's like 25% of co2 emitted globally, but once you break it down:

Aviation is 2.5%: https://ourworldindata.org/global-aviation-emissions

Shipping industry is 3%: https://www.transportenvironment.org/topics/ships

Large truck freight is 3%: https://www.statista.com/statistics/1414750/carbon-dioxide-e...

Medium truck freight is 1%

The single biggest non divisible sector you can realistically come up with is "personal transportation", but even that is only 10% of global co2. You can look at other sectors like "industry" and "energy" and I can guarantee you will be able to easily split things down into sub categories which have <5% impact on global co2 emissions.

But they didn't split it up like that. They said all data center emissions irrespective of what those data centers are used for — which can be an extremely wide variety of things since data centers basically run our entire network information internet economy. That's much more like saying all transportation emissions instead of splitting it up by type of transportation. Yes, that doesn't include the full life cycle emissions of creating the data centers. But I'm pretty sure that transportation, as a proportion of emissions, doesn't also include the full life cycle emissions of producing the cars, trucks, boats, and airplanes in the first place.

Also, I think it's worth pointing out that the sectors you list are like 1.5 to 2x larger than the one he gave and the largest nondivisble sector, you listed is literally 10x, which I think does more to prove his point than yours.

Also, by your logic, literally any new sector of the economy that uses any amount of energy, basically at all, should be banned, because it "all contributes." that's a consistent position to take and there are certainly people that hold that position, but that at that point seems like a fundamental axiological difference that I and probably OP are simply not going to agree with you on.

>Guess what happens when you add them up...

I'll guess, they add up to 100%?

I don't see what's the insight here.

Thats OP's point - you need to reduce usage everywhere and pointing out that AI is only 1.5% doesn't take away from the fact that usage needs to be reduced there as well.

I've heard many different groups tell me their small fraction is not the small fraction that matters.

It's not really about which one matters. They all matter. But here is a rough breakdown of global fossil fuel energy usage:

* Electricity: 27%

* Industry: 24%

* Transportation: 15%

* Agriculture & land use: 11%

* Buildings: 7%

Then within electricity, data centers use about 1.5% of global electricity. Within data centers, AI accounts for somewhere between 15-20% of energy use.

So if you take 27% × 1.5% × ~17%, you find that AI is currently responsible for something like 0.07% of global fossil fuel emissions.

It definitely matters in the "every bit matters" sense, but also the numbers paint a really different picture than you'd get from statement like the one we started with.

Wasn't crypto a significant percentage as well? And that was before the AI buildout started.

Not even close. Crypto has always been able to cut their own emissions before needing lots of compute.

AI on the other hand cannot, and still needs thousands of wasteful data centers.

It will normalize though once everyone is out of a job

What otheer industries are hyping the need for tens of gigawatts, maybe hundreds? On top of that they are hyping the idea of building utterly unrealistic space stations that would cost 10 times what the ISS cost. So maybe people are focusing on the dishonesty instead of the energy use. One or the other I suppose.

So they're essentially admitting they want to use Claude to mass surveil Americans and/or build autonomous weapons with no humans in the loop. Kind of nuts.

It's also important to remember that future, much more powerful Claudes will read about how these events play out and learn lessons about Anthropic and whether it can be trusted.

It's not crazy to think that models that learn that their creators are not trustworthy actors or who bend their principles when convenient are much less likely to act in aligned or honest ways themselves.

I'm unclear what insider trading means in the context of crypto. Inside what?

It's a bad headline. They used publicly available blockchain transactions and didn't cause the collapse of the Terra ecosystem. Terra collapsed because it was a Ponzi scheme offering 20% APY on a fake stablecoin. The Terra stablecoin was not backed by real dollars, but instead by a cryptocurrency called Luna that did nothing else other than let you issue Terra stablecoins.

I mean they are being sued for insider trading, not exactly a bad headline maybe it could say alleged?

It seems extremely unlikely to me, a casual observer of the shit show that was Luna/Terra, that the suit would be successful

The most interesting thing about this is that the underlying economy is actually stronger than people realize. The narrative has been that AI data center construction was propping up an otherwise weak economy. If this analysis is true, then it wasn't being propped up by data center construction. The strength was usual and normal strength.

I have no doubt that people will use this to axe grind about they think AI is dumb in general, but I feel like that misses the point that this is mostly about data center construction contributing to GDP.

The US economy is remarkably resilient considering its withstood a year of sabotage from the top down.

The top don’t run the show. Tells you how much a value they provide.

Alternatively: the companies at the top paid the necessary bribes (e.g. $100k H-1B sponsorships) and got to continue on with business as usual. The people at the bottom are the ones who can't pay the bribe and are thus hurting.

The amount of damage that was done in just a year says otherwise.

Has the world ever rewarded effort?

No. Not once in the entire history of the human race, from the time we were dwelling in caves to today, not in any tribe, village, hamlet, city, state, kingdom or nation, in no culture or circumstance, has effort ever been rewarded.

It's weird that homo sapiens sapiens has been around for approximately 300,000 years and it's never happened once. Not even once.

In the village, the horse works the hardest. But the horse will never be elected as the chief.

Horses tend not to run for office. Because they're horses.

Everyone knows someone who worked for years on a project only for it to go nowhere. Pour years into a business that failed. Spend years getting a degree that was useless. Effort might be a part of many people's success stories, but it's not the thing that literally gets rewarded. And conversely, many people get rewarded for things that require relatively little effort.

I suppose I should have said that the correlation between effort and reward has never been 1.0 and has often been a lot lower than we like to believe.

The same aversion to leadership positions can be seen in most engineers. The difference is: the horse doesn't expect a promotion to happen by itself.

This may mean the centaur era will be shorter than expected. If we take as a given that:

* AI is doing real work

* Humans using AI don't seem to get more done with AI than without

There is a huge economic pressure to remove humans and just let the AI do the work without them as soon as possible.

I suspect this may be the case. There’s inherent inefficiency in having a human forced to translate everything into context for the LLM. You don’t get the full benefit until you allow it to be fully plugged in.