I’ve been learning Spanish on Duolingo. It has brought me from zero to scoring 96% on this test – I didn’t realise I was so advanced!
I love the concept and the execution. This is a rare instance of a Show HN that I not just admire, but can easily see myself using regularly and paying for.
Please, please monetise this in such a way as to avoid enshittification.
> How did we go from energy consumed to human time?
Directly. Energy is consumed by humans over time.
That time may be spent on doing tasks. Spending that time doing task increases energy consumption over baseline (though humans have substantial energy storage, so, for tasks shorter than couple hours, the cost is usually paid after such tasks).
> The caloric needs of a human are minuscule compared to the electricity converted to waste heat to train and operate an LLM.
The costs of operating: not really, and that's the whole point of comparison. Sure, humans are energy-efficient in some aspects - but the brains can only do so much. There's plenty of work that LLMs do faster and better than humans, so much better that no human can match them. And speed means more tasks, so energy use per task is lower.
Also, if you're talking about cost of operating LLMs in general - i.e. keeping them running and doing arbitrary work, you really need to compare it against costs of keeping a human alive and available to do the work. So it's not just food, but also hygiene - including e.g. delivering water, heating water for laundry and showers, etc. - and similar consumables.
As for training costs, that must be a joke. Do you know how much it costs to train a human? Energy or otherwise? As a parent of three kids I'll tell you: a lot.
If you include the energy a human uses from birth to ~18, and then energy used while they're trained for whatever jobs you want to compare against AI, then the comparison gets even worse for humans.
The humans already exist. We’re neither creating nor destroying them for the purpose of doing an LLM equivalent task, nor am I bathing or clothing myself to think up an answer to something, and evaluating the problem as though we are is a sick joke. This is the most unserious argument in favor of AI I’ve seen to date.
The scenario is a task needs to be done. Whether it's for business, personal, whatever. It's a task. It needs to be done somehow. It can be done by a human, or by AI.
We are calculating the cost of doing this task. I don't know how else we can be more clear.
Honestly I'm very unconvinced by this article author's sense of need to calculate the energy cost of the LLM as an argument against it. But if we're using it as an argument, it's only fair to compare how else the task can be completed (i.e. by the human) and what it would cost. What is there to not understand about this comparison?
> We’re neither creating nor destroying them for the purpose of doing an LLM equivalent task
Sure, so drop the training costs on both sides.
Imagine company sends you on a business trip to a different country, for a month-long stay. Okay, you exist and have to eat and sleep anyway, but I can't imagine you accepting this as an argument from your employer - "we don't need to reimburse your hotel or food or other expenses, after all, we're neither creating nor destroying you for purpose of this assignment, and you'll be eating and sleeping and bathing anyway".
No, we don’t have to create an LLM to do a task. That’s a choice with costs we can evaluate.
If you really don’t understand how corporate travel arrangements work, I’ll clue you in:
Your employer reimburses your hotel even though you’d be sleeping anyway because your place to sleep doesn’t exist in the place they’re sending you. They pay your meals because eating out is more expensive than eating at home and your food and kitchen at home doesn’t exist in the place they’re sending you and also traveling is a pain so you deserve to treat yourself a little. They don’t generally reimburse your laundry costs unless you have stay more days than one can reasonably carry clean clothes for in a standard suitcase. Your bathing needs come free with the hotel.
I hope this helps you navigate the strange and confusing world we live in.
Thank you for the explanation. It matches my experience of having been sent across the world on business trips that lasted a month per stay (yes, standard suitcase doesn't fit enough clean clothes for those).
I don't see your problem with the comparisons. We don't have to hire people and train them for the job either. GPUs already exist and could be running something else than LLMs (say, crypto miners).
I feel it's you who's having problems drawing boundaries to allow for an apples-to-apples comparison.
The people are there expensing energy even if you don’t hire them, but we can choose not to expend the energy to make an LLM. I don’t know how to explain it any more simply than that.
Reminder that to open a jwz.org link from HN you have to bypass the browser sending a Referer header, most easily by right-clicking link -> Copy link and then pasting it into the address box.
; in: THE 'END
; (THE 'END)
;
; caught ERROR:
; Error while parsing arguments to special operator THE:
; too few elements in
; ('END)
; to satisfy lambda list
; (VALUE-TYPE FORM):
; exactly 2 expected, but got 1
> Sure, you could just give up on roundtripping. But it’s important!
In the vast majority of cases, it’s not. If removing comments breaks roundtripping, then so does altering the indentation or adding/removing whitespace, even ever-so-slightly.
EDN parsers strip comments when read – it’s not an issue in practice.
‘Why the giraffe? Two reasons. First, it can see farther due to its height; second, it has one of the biggest hearts of all land mammals. Besides, its ossicones make you believe it listens to you when you look at it.’ – My NVC teacher
I'm very literal minded and many metaphors irk me because they require a unspoken shared agreement of only considering the positive aspects that match and ignore the inconvenient ones. Like all sports metaphors used in work related activities. But still, don't skip nvc just because you can't accept a violent animal as a symbol for non violent communication. It has to much value for us literal minded people.
I agree. Violence is everywhere and specifically in the animal kingdom it is weird to apply a moral judgement on violent animals. Eg. the wolf that in nvc symbolizes violent language does nothing wrong when it gathers the food it needs to live. There is no malice however "ruthless" it looks from the outside. And the giraffe also does nothing wrong when it protects it's grounds by kicking a hyena's head in.
But we humans that use these animals as metaphors when trying to improve our communication skills can apply a moral judgement and say that this way of communicating is better than that way. But we literal minded often get derailed when the metaphors are not 100% solid so I often think that metaphors are bad, or at least risky. (but I like these specific metaphors in nvc somehow)
https://www.lambdasierra.com/2023/abbreviating/
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