Posts by cbrisuda 17 publicly visible posts • joined 14 May 2024
This type of thing upsets me. Given the enormous environmental cost from running LLMs (very high energy consumption, largely fueled by fossil fuels, plus water use, noise pollution, etc), I think it’s unethical to run them “for funsies.” Generating three million lines of code just to make a crappy browser - unimaginable to me to be so wasteful. As someone who would like a habitable planet for the rest of my life, LLMs are so saddening
Purdue’s core competencies are electrical and mechanical engineering, those sorts of things. Is there a better example of people who shouldn’t be touching gen AI than people in the fields that Purdue is most known for?
If I were hiring an engineer eg to build a bridge, I’d rather hire one from a school with a strict no AI policy than one with gen AI as a requirement. IMO Purdue is shooting itself in the foot.
Everytime I see something like this I just feel heartbroken because of the enormous amount of energy being wasted on these things. My hope for a safe habitable planet is collapsing. I don’t understand why people with decisionmaking authority over these things are so oblivious to the reality of anthropogenic climate change and the extent to which electricity consumption drives it.
Any conversation about these tools that doesn’t discuss the enormous environmental consequences is IMO negligent at best. The power consumption of these tools is undoing some of the progress made in transitions to power generation that doesn’t worsen anthropogenic climate change. I’ve personally always dreamed of burning to death in a wildfire or drowning in a flash flood, and thanks to AI, that dream is even more likely to come true.
IMO, every conversation about companies slapping LLMs onto their products must have a mention of electricity consumption and climate change. Thanks for contributing to the loss of hospitable habitats for humans, Salesforce (and M$ and Google and so on). My climate related despair has exponentially worsened.
I’m very pleased to see this. I’ve been concerned about the use of facial recognition at airports since I first saw it. My concern is that it’s a boiling the frog situation. We’re so used to intrusions and surveillance in the airport context, so it’s no big deal to add facial recognition to that situation. But then we get used to facial recognition and it’ll spread. I believe there needs to be robust debate and civic engagement on the issue of facial recognition by government entities, and I’m pleased to see that someone is working on it.
"We've always tried to run a business that does interesting work and makes money, and I don't think those imperatives are going to change.”
Am I hallucinating or isn’t/wasn’t their mission statement something like democratizing access to technology? Not sure how “interesting and profitable” slots into that.
Easy to say your goals won’t change if you’ve already changed them…
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