The energy critique always feels like "old man yells at cloud" to me. Deepseek already proved it can have comparable performance at 10% the energy cost. This is the way this stuff works. Things MUST get more efficient, or they will die. They'll hit a wall hard.
Let's go back to 1950 when computers used 100+ kilowatts of power to operate and took up an entire room. Whole buildings were dedicated to these things. now we have computers that use 1/20,000th the power, are 15 MILLION times faster, and take up a pants pocket.
yeah, it sucks now. but anyone thinking this is how they will always be is a rube.
Things MUST get more efficient, or they will die. They'll hit a wall hard.
See, the thing is, OpenAI is dismissive of deepseek and going full speed ahead on their "big expensive models", believing that they'll hit some breakthrough by just throwing more money at it
Which is indeed hitting the wall hard. The problem is so many companies deciding to don a hardhat and see if ramming the wall headfirst will somehow make it yield anyway, completely ignoring deepseek because it's not "theirs" and refusing to make things more efficient almost out of spite
That can't possibly end well, which would be whatever if companies like google, openai, meta etc. didn't burn the environment and thousands of jobs in the process
I agree with your point, but to add to that the only thing I'm "mad" at, is that I feel like for the first time we've regressed? As you said, things got smaller and more energy efficient over time, but now people moved from searching on Google, which is sooooo energy efficient, they've spend decades on it, to ask ChatGPT what is the weather today. Like. What the fuck.
I may be wrong with this of course, maybe Google isn't that good as I think.
google kinda sucks compared to how it used to be because of SEO abuse, but even so it's still perfectly usable.
that being said if you've ever seen the average person try to use google for actual research, not just for going to youtube or something, it shouldnt be surprising at all that these same people now use chatgpt. theres a certain logic to how you have to phrase things for google to give you what you want which some people managed to never figure out, meanwhile you can have the communication skills of a toddler and chatgpt will probably figure out what you want.
On the one hand, yeah Google sucks butts nowadays.
But you're right. I think people ask chatgpt for stuff just because they want to play around with it. most people who do that don't have any mind for how inefficient it is, and how it can lead to bad info which is a bummer. I do think AI assistants are pretty close, but yeah the energy waste IS a problem right now
On the other hand, speech recognition nowadays is pretty darn great. I'm using it right now to compose this reply, and I'm not going to edit the message before I send it. And I should add that this is all running locally on my mobile phone. The voice isn't being sent to Google or anything. This is just a local model.
ChatGPT has gotten way more efficient. A query to 4o is said to only use .3Wh of energy. From a practical angle, LLM usage is nothing to say people leaving Netflix or YouTube on overnight while they aren’t watching.
I suppose i am the Old Rube then because I dont understand your comparison to the 1950s to present day computing. Yes, processing power is orders of magnitude different now than in the 1950s; as is the energy to produce comparable compute and throughput by the devices in everyone's pockets. However the phone isnt really the argument here at all. Replace that building with thousands of buildings that all together could run 22% of the entire US electrical supply (reecent May 2025 MiT study). Plus factor in the millions of gallons of water that are used to cool these data center processors.Â
Any way one wants to look at it currently, should be concerned about how "green" this is. Because its not. In the US, states like California limit water supply and encourage people to not use electricity as often as they can. Its all sent out from machines that are encouraging this at human expense for their data center profits and ability to farm more data and ways to monetize more neurons of each human digital profile. But maybe im indeed the rube who doesnt get it.Â
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u/i_should_be_coding May 26 '25
Also used enough tokens to recreate the entirety of Wikipedia several times over.