alt Hacker NewsRight now the S&P 500 is going wild due to the promise of AI automating everything.
Who is the "we" who is going to shut it down? Certainly not the US government. Nor the Chinese government w.r.t. their tech industry. Are you going to start the insurgency? Is there going to be an equivalent one in every developed part of the world?
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Look at how many data center projects are getting shut down by grassroots movements, or how the approval rating for AI is like worse than congress and it's geeting booed at commencement speeches. I don't need to start an insurgency, people are already pissed off and the volume is growing.
The stock boost is, as most will note, a bubble. It will enrich a lot of bad people and leave average people holding the bag, but its not going to go on forever.
Yeah, it is crazy to me. Yesterday I did the math how much it would take to fully replace "just" 1M SWEs: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48382414 . It turns out you need 380GW of constant power (or 80%+ of US current production). And I conservatively assumed 0.5J / token, which was a number calculated for llama3 8B parameters. Yeah, hardware and models are more efficient now, but I expect SOTA models to be at least 10x that and I don't think there was a 10x in efficiency since llama 3.
All of this to say that the AI hype is not considering the energy portion of the equation enough. It won't automate everything not because it can't but because there is just not enough energy to go around unless there is a 100x or more efficiency gain just around the corner.