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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 20th, 2023

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  • These figures are too cherry picked for the shock value. You could go the opposite end and say that (these are all true, I’ve tried my best to research them):

    8.5 Wh (average of all daily queries for a user) is also…

    • Equivalent to running a 2000 W hair dryer or a kettle for 20 seconds
    • Equivalent to idling a car during a traffic light and not turning off the engine
    • A quarter of the energy required to reheat a ready meal in the microwave (roughly 45 Wh)
    • The power usage of a Macbook screen over just 30 minutes.

    850 MWh (whole consumption of all AI queries in the world) is also equivalent to…

    • The power consumption of ONE single cruise ship for 12h (link)
    • Charging 0.002% of the 75 million electric cars in the world
    • The energy stored in the fuel tanks of 2000 petrol cars - a small stadium car park in Europe
    • The amount of energy the largest solar plant in Spain or Germany generate… In a couple of hours.

    So yes - AI bad… But for other reasons. This is a diversion. Datacentres powered by coal are bad. Cruise ships are worse.

    The problem isn’t that the whole world needs less than a solar farm’s worth of energy for AI. The bigger problem is the social damage of AI - including the fact that this “expansion at all costs” is justifying getting that energy from non-renewable sources.

    But seriously, one single cruise ship uses more energy than all of the AI in the world. They serve no useful purpose and there are hundreds of those.







  • I’m very mildly pro-AI, in the sense that I remain optimistic there will be at least a few cool use cases and I’d love to find them.

    So I tried Dia… And uninstalled it a few hours later. Why would I want to “chat with my tabs”? Even if I didn’t think this was a rubbish use case, every browser comes with a chatbot sidebar/extension/whatever, why would I want to change browsers just for that?

    Heavy pass. Also, after how they abandoned Arc, I don’t think they can be trusted to develop a product and not pull the rug from under the users when it becomes mildly inconvenient to keep working on it.


  • They’re absolutely failing because the execs are hype-driven clowns who focus on the wrong metrics.

    “Failing to drive rapid revenue growth”, WTF. Leaving aside whether GenAI is a useful technology or not, it’s never been a technology to “drive rapid revenue growth”, just like Microsoft Office, or calculators, or a million other technologies.

    This is all just a pipe dream from a clueless exec class that prioritises short-term profits and hoped that implementing a glorified autocorrect would make people flock en masse to their random product. Why would you think an AI chatbot in your online clothes shop would make me like your ill-fitting jeans any better, you overpaid monkey?

    Maybe you could have hoped for employees to achieve a “5% productivity increase” or something mildly realistic, but no, your brain-eating slugs told you to shoehorn AI into everything and 👏We 👏Don’t 👏Need👏AI👏Fucking👏Everywhere👏

    I know I’m preaching to the choir but I needed the rant.