zlacker

>>kcorbi+(OP)
Interesting analysis. Suprised HN is so negative towards AI (and that the positive:negative ratio to AI is about the same as it was for Crypto a few years ago!)

The obvious difference is that AI has abundant use-cases, while Crypto only has tenuous ones.

Maybe there is added negativity considering it is a technology where there is clearly a potential threat to jobs on a personal level (e.g. lift operators were very negative towards automatic lifts).

>>Closi+g8
There is a lot of negativity about the way it is used I think.

Most people will agree that LLMs are pretty neat, but now instead of every startup being "like Uber but for ..." they are "like chatGPT but for ...".

Everyone is trying to chuck AI into their products and most of the time there is no need, or the product is just a thin fine-tune over an existing LLM model that adds essentially near-zero value. HN is fairly negative on that sort of thing I think (rightly so IMO)

>>mattlo+Ff
I think a major problem that is going to become more and more obvious is that AI is actually pretty expensive compared to good old deterministic computing. If there's a way to solve a problem without resorting to sending an inference request to a gpu cluster, we should do it that way. Otherwise you're wasting electricity.

>>__loam+cm
Let's zeroth-order a single GPT-4 query as using 0.01 kWh (which is probably massive overkill for most queries but we'll roll with it).

Let's high ball US residential electricity prices are about 25¢ per kWh. So 25¢ of electricity gets us 100 GPT-4 queries. $25 gets us 10_000.

Let's low ball average US developer salaries at a cool $100_000/yr. 50 40 hour weeks in a year makes 2_000 working hours makes $50 per hour. So with our very generous margins all working against us, a US developer would have to be making 20_000 GPT-4 queries an hour, or a little over 5 per second, in order to end up costing in electricity what he is making salary-wise.

I have no real point to this story except that electricity is much cheaper than most people have a useful frame of reference for. My mom used to complain about teenage me not running the dishwasher at full load until I worked out that the electricity and water together costed about 50¢ a run and offered her a clean $20 to offset my next 400 only three-quarters full runs.

Your bonus programming tip: Many programming languages let you legally use underscores to space large numbers! Try "million = 1_000_000" next time you fire up Python.