Funny because "e-waste" is also how I would characterise the content that these generative AI models output.
465 days ago [-]
ForOldHack 465 days ago [-]
Saying AI will generate tons of e-waste is redundant. AI is waste.
stavros 465 days ago [-]
I really don't understand the utter lack of imagination on HN lately. Here's an amazing technology that nobody could even fathom existing five years ago, and people's take is "AI is waste".
Like, really? If you've used ChatGPT and it didn't do anything useful for you, I'm sorry, but the problem was between the keyboard and the chair.
xanderlewis 465 days ago [-]
Well, I can understand it. It is an amazing (in the literal sense) technology, and yet after playing with it you come to realise it doesn't really deliver what it promises and is more of a demonstration of the power of enormous amounts of data than it is some kind of breakthrough in artificial intelligence. Also, it's probably mostly a backlash to the constant hype and outrageous claims of impending doom or utopia rampant on Twitter and Reddit; HN seemed to be nothing but AI/LLM talk for pretty much the whole of 2023.
What does ChatGPT do for you?
stavros 465 days ago [-]
It writes my code, it explains concepts or context or phenomena to me, it takes notes, it handles my calendar, it generates images, it does boring jobs, along with a very long tail of ad-hoc tasks.
I don't know about the claims, but "the claims are exaggerated" is very different from "AI is waste".
lostmsu 465 days ago [-]
There is also a possibility that the GP just doesn't look/extrapolate into the future farther than a few weeks. That would explain the lack of excitement.
For example, did a month ago they anticipate the computer use tool? When did they expect it to happen?
HarryHirsch 465 days ago [-]
You can ask it about Nietzsche, and it will reply with wonderful and esoteric interpretations of his work, because he is widely studied and ChatGPT has ingested all the works of all Niezsche exegets there are.
You ask it about Hölderlin, and quality drops off, because Hölderlin is not that well studied in the Anglo-American sphere, the majority of Hölderlin studies is in German. It's odd that it cannot translate what it ingested in German and bring it back up in English.
And when you ask it about chemistry ChatGPT is totally lost because it has no idea about concepts, even though the concepts are explained in the textbooks it has read. Until there is a breakthrough that allows AI models to gain understanding all these models are plainly useless.
One can tell - any graduate student in any of the sciences has read way less than ChatGPT but their understanding is infinitely better.
Synaesthesia 465 days ago [-]
No no, don't get me wrong it's very impressive what "AI" can do. For instance it's ability to look at a huge amount of data and generate useful responses is obviously impressive.
But I do think it's overhyped, and I was referring specifically to the generative AI which although cool, doesn't actually create anything new.
10294j1902 465 days ago [-]
Given how grievance artists community has been for these AI, it is very easy to understand. The tech is amazing, sure. But I think you are just not seeing the cost.
If I just took on 1 million USD in debt without a clear plan how to repay it. I would not feel optimistic and imaginative about how I can spend this money. I would go into risk averse mindset.
consteval 464 days ago [-]
AI might not be waste, but it is wasteful. I mean, at least a few orders of magnitude less efficient than a human. It costs me almost no energy to write an essay, ChatGPT on the other hand...
stavros 464 days ago [-]
We should calculate how many calories you burn in the time it takes you to write an essay, versus how many calories ChatGPT burns.
throawayonthe 465 days ago [-]
[dead]
Spivak 465 days ago [-]
How are you on HN with this kind of attitude? I get that AI is overhyped for a lot of applications but I just shipped an LLM powered feature at $dayjob that saves around 4-8 hrs per use. Our previous version based on NLP had been scrapped for years because it performed so terribly. We just paid humans to do it. The difference between the old
and the new is scoring <5% correct to consistently hitting 95%. It's that bird xkcd.
Yoric 465 days ago [-]
So far, that is the main use case for AI. Which is great, but probably doesn't deserve the trillion dollar hype (and e-waste).
We'll probably get another AI winter once the hype dies down, but we'll have added a few more tools to our toolbelt.
Spivak 465 days ago [-]
I can agree with you there. I don't think the new use-cases that have been unlocked are world-shattering but they're nonetheless really cool.
We're finally going to have dictation that works reliably, voice assistants that don't suck, really sick photoshop tools, grammar and writing style checkers built into Word that can provide real feedback, a lot of stuff that just wasn't possible before.
wildrhythms 465 days ago [-]
But have you considered all the money to be made storing and running ads on that e-waste?
ForOldHack 465 days ago [-]
Even in death, old TVs still command attention.
94b45eb4 465 days ago [-]
It’s a race to create an AI good enough to solve the e-waste problem before the e-waste problem becomes such a large problem that it prevents AI advancement.
Yoric 465 days ago [-]
So far, I haven't seen any sign that LLM/GenAI could be used to solve e-waste. It's definitely an impressive technology, but seems to be much suited at generating porn than at solving global issues.
soco 465 days ago [-]
It's a race to ignore all this, calling it "woke snowflake worries lol", and enjoying the short term economical benefits of AI making the shareholders happy. And I'm not even sarcastic.
Fortunately we will just be able to ask AI what to do about it. I’m sure it will come up with something.
pimlottc 465 days ago [-]
It keeps telling me to allocate more resources to making paper clips
lagrange77 465 days ago [-]
"Oh, thank you for pointing that out, you're totally right! My previous answer would have killed humankind as a side effect. Here's an updated version of the solution: ..."
jiggawatts 465 days ago [-]
These “generates e-waste” articles are political hit pieces. I hope we’re all intelligent enough to recognise the absurdity of the statement.
In case it is unclear, a similar article was going around the Internet a few years ago complaining about the “tons of e-waste created by Apple Airpods”.
Yes, that’s true in the sense that Apple was producing “tons” of e-waste annually… two of them. One ton wouldn’t be “tons”, you see, so the article was technically correct in the dumbest and most nakedly deceptive way possible.
Waste is about inefficiency. It implies no or negative utility. There’s a hint of huge landfills and truck after truck of bulky stuff filling that up.
AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man.
To invoke the word “waste” in juxtaposition to these things is so absurd, so contrary to their essential nature that it’s clearly a deliberate falsehood, signalling membership in a group by its absurdity. It’s like the official statements on RT that yet another oligarch “fell out” of a window. Everyone knows what really happened there. The claim of defenestration is a coded signal telling the listeners a very different message to the verbatim text.
Someone who is scared of AI wrote this article or had it written on their behalf. It’s the product of a Luddite, or someone whose job is about to be replaced.
“Stop the efficiencies! My career as a copy editor is at risk! I mean… it’s surely wasteful to optimise my job away with a chip that’s a mere square inch in size and weighs a gram!”
jeffbee 465 days ago [-]
It sounds ridiculous in the article but without the PDF of the paper it is hard to judge. They are saying that the annual rate of e-wasting will increase 1000x in ten years, which sounds a bit off considering how large the IT industry already is, and how small of a component the AI subindustry is. If I had access to the PDF I would scan it for several common errors, such as assuming the perpetuation of an apparently exponential process, or writing down an unrealistically short economic life for the equipment. Warranties often run out in 3-5 years but cloud operators keep their gear for 10-15 years.
Nullabillity 465 days ago [-]
> AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man.
Even if we were to take these claims at face value... none of these things imply that the thing is useful.
jiggawatts 465 days ago [-]
They’re more useful than mine tailings or household waste, both of which are generated at a scale many orders of magnitude greater than AI-specific chips.
Even as discarded waste, electronics tend to be more useful to recyclers because they contain copper.
louwrentius 465 days ago [-]
The current AI craze doesn’t feel like it’s really about AI. It’s Silicon Valley being desperate for (growing) growth and shareholder value.
Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
It’s been a while since 2007, all the incentives are there to keep the ball rolling, but it will stop at some point.
Then we IT people with six figure salaries will learn that we should have listened more to David Graeber.
kylehotchkiss 465 days ago [-]
Don't you think people will get bored of it? I am starting to.
Apple has a few new cool AL based components in iOS 18. But one of the ones they've spent the past year harping on is the Cowboy frog emoji generator.
digging 465 days ago [-]
Getting bored of it isn't the same as having no use for it. This stuff is 2 years old; we haven't figured it all out. Even if all development on the actual models stopped now, we'd still be seeing new uses of LLMs emerging for years to come.
ForOldHack 465 days ago [-]
We have no use for crypto-currency or Carriages. In 1910 there were 240,000 carriage manufactures in the U.S, only 4 years later, there were 5. There are still 2. Technology does that. It does not matter how old... If its useless, its useless. Did we figure a use for the appendix?
wongarsu 465 days ago [-]
> Did we figure a use for the appendix?
We did. It's a kind of safe house for gut flora. Not as important to modern humans, but it allows some of your gut flora to survive dysentery, cholera, etc. It's also a place for your immune system to get acquainted with the beneficial bacteria in your gut flora, and seems to fulfill a number of other roles in the immune system
More to the point of AI: this may also be like the dotcom bubble. Lots of hype that far outstrips the capabilities of the technology, but the technology is ultimately useful and impactful. Few companies survived the dotcom crash, and a lot of the tech companies with the biggest impact were only founded in the decade after the crash, when the technology was more mature and expectations more realistic
digging 465 days ago [-]
> In 1910 there were 240,000 carriage manufactures in the U.S, only 4 years later, there were 5.
This makes no sense. Carriages weren't invented in the 1900s. They were displaced by a new technology. LLMs are not the carriages of our world, they are the cars.
> We have no use for crypto-currency
You have no use for it, but a lot of people do (not just for speculation).
Mistletoe 465 days ago [-]
> But one of the ones they've spent the past year harping on is the Cowboy frog emoji generator.
You know it sounds like a line from a David Foster Wallace novel, but nope it’s real life. I get that a lot these days.
gruez 465 days ago [-]
>The current AI craze doesn’t feel like it’s really about AI. It’s Silicon Valley being desperate for (growing) growth and shareholder value.
Isn't this true statement about literally any other technology? Do you think the railroad craze[1] was really about railroads?
>Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
>Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
If you replaced the preceding paragraphs to be about weaving machines, this could pass for ned ludd's writings.
xanderlewis 465 days ago [-]
I think the point is that it isn't really about creating something people want; it's about creating something that inevitably becomes a necessity for life and work whether you like it or not.
Twenty years ago we had the iPod, and 'tech' consisted of exciting consumer products we all wanted in our pockets and services that would enrich our lives by enabling our creativity and connecting us. Of course in business one aims to make a profit, but one could hope to do so simply by making things people wanted. Today, it doesn't feel like that. Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
gruez 465 days ago [-]
>I think the point is that it isn't really about creating something people want; it's about creating something that inevitably becomes a necessity for life and work whether you like it or not.
Sounds like something that would apply to tractors or looms as well. Do you think farmers or textile makers had a choice on whether to use those technologies or not?
>Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
>There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
xanderlewis 465 days ago [-]
When I say ‘tech’, I’m not just using it as a synonym for technology — I’m talking about the last fifty years or so of consumer, largely opt-in, technology like entertainment devices and social networks.
> So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
Yeah. I thought this could be confusing. What I mean is not that such technology is likely to appear any time soon; rather that it’s thought to be likely. It would certainly create value if it came along, but it’d also be the end of the world as we know it.
465 days ago [-]
kylehotchkiss 465 days ago [-]
One Person's Trash is Another Crypto Miners Treasure.
meta_x_ai 465 days ago [-]
oh look another article that brings the HN luddites come out of their woodwork and spew "hurr durr AI hype/bad/waste"
Rendered at 04:47:01 GMT+0000 (Coordinated Universal Time) with Vercel.
Like, really? If you've used ChatGPT and it didn't do anything useful for you, I'm sorry, but the problem was between the keyboard and the chair.
What does ChatGPT do for you?
I don't know about the claims, but "the claims are exaggerated" is very different from "AI is waste".
For example, did a month ago they anticipate the computer use tool? When did they expect it to happen?
You ask it about Hölderlin, and quality drops off, because Hölderlin is not that well studied in the Anglo-American sphere, the majority of Hölderlin studies is in German. It's odd that it cannot translate what it ingested in German and bring it back up in English.
And when you ask it about chemistry ChatGPT is totally lost because it has no idea about concepts, even though the concepts are explained in the textbooks it has read. Until there is a breakthrough that allows AI models to gain understanding all these models are plainly useless.
One can tell - any graduate student in any of the sciences has read way less than ChatGPT but their understanding is infinitely better.
But I do think it's overhyped, and I was referring specifically to the generative AI which although cool, doesn't actually create anything new.
If I just took on 1 million USD in debt without a clear plan how to repay it. I would not feel optimistic and imaginative about how I can spend this money. I would go into risk averse mindset.
We'll probably get another AI winter once the hype dies down, but we'll have added a few more tools to our toolbelt.
We're finally going to have dictation that works reliably, voice assistants that don't suck, really sick photoshop tools, grammar and writing style checkers built into Word that can provide real feedback, a lot of stuff that just wasn't possible before.
In case it is unclear, a similar article was going around the Internet a few years ago complaining about the “tons of e-waste created by Apple Airpods”.
Yes, that’s true in the sense that Apple was producing “tons” of e-waste annually… two of them. One ton wouldn’t be “tons”, you see, so the article was technically correct in the dumbest and most nakedly deceptive way possible.
Waste is about inefficiency. It implies no or negative utility. There’s a hint of huge landfills and truck after truck of bulky stuff filling that up.
AirPods and AI chips are the opposite of inefficient! They’re some of the smallest, densest, most concentrated and space-efficient products ever made by man.
To invoke the word “waste” in juxtaposition to these things is so absurd, so contrary to their essential nature that it’s clearly a deliberate falsehood, signalling membership in a group by its absurdity. It’s like the official statements on RT that yet another oligarch “fell out” of a window. Everyone knows what really happened there. The claim of defenestration is a coded signal telling the listeners a very different message to the verbatim text.
Someone who is scared of AI wrote this article or had it written on their behalf. It’s the product of a Luddite, or someone whose job is about to be replaced.
“Stop the efficiencies! My career as a copy editor is at risk! I mean… it’s surely wasteful to optimise my job away with a chip that’s a mere square inch in size and weighs a gram!”
Even if we were to take these claims at face value... none of these things imply that the thing is useful.
Even as discarded waste, electronics tend to be more useful to recyclers because they contain copper.
Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
It’s been a while since 2007, all the incentives are there to keep the ball rolling, but it will stop at some point.
Then we IT people with six figure salaries will learn that we should have listened more to David Graeber.
Apple has a few new cool AL based components in iOS 18. But one of the ones they've spent the past year harping on is the Cowboy frog emoji generator.
We did. It's a kind of safe house for gut flora. Not as important to modern humans, but it allows some of your gut flora to survive dysentery, cholera, etc. It's also a place for your immune system to get acquainted with the beneficial bacteria in your gut flora, and seems to fulfill a number of other roles in the immune system
More to the point of AI: this may also be like the dotcom bubble. Lots of hype that far outstrips the capabilities of the technology, but the technology is ultimately useful and impactful. Few companies survived the dotcom crash, and a lot of the tech companies with the biggest impact were only founded in the decade after the crash, when the technology was more mature and expectations more realistic
This makes no sense. Carriages weren't invented in the 1900s. They were displaced by a new technology. LLMs are not the carriages of our world, they are the cars.
> We have no use for crypto-currency
You have no use for it, but a lot of people do (not just for speculation).
You know it sounds like a line from a David Foster Wallace novel, but nope it’s real life. I get that a lot these days.
Isn't this true statement about literally any other technology? Do you think the railroad craze[1] was really about railroads?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Railway_Mania
>Another obvious aspect it that it may help do work that could be done by people, thus helping to keep the worker class - that’s you! - subdued, fighting amongst yourselves.
>Meanwhile the ‘good stuff’ can only be offered by those large companies, who have the power to make them ‘good enough’ thus making the rest more dependent.
If you replaced the preceding paragraphs to be about weaving machines, this could pass for ned ludd's writings.
Twenty years ago we had the iPod, and 'tech' consisted of exciting consumer products we all wanted in our pockets and services that would enrich our lives by enabling our creativity and connecting us. Of course in business one aims to make a profit, but one could hope to do so simply by making things people wanted. Today, it doesn't feel like that. Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
Sounds like something that would apply to tractors or looms as well. Do you think farmers or textile makers had a choice on whether to use those technologies or not?
>Sure — recent AI developments are hugely impressive, but what value are companies like OpenAI creating and who, other than AI geeks and researchers, is really hankering for this stuff? It feels more like an arms race towards something completely unknown. It's a collective panic that AGI (read: God) is just around the corner and whoever gets there first wins everything.
>There was no such insanity in previous 'tech' eras. There's always been competition and hype, but the prospect of unlocking the technology to end all technologies has never before been credible enough.
So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
> So which one is it? In the first half you're implying AI doesn't create value and that nobody actually wants it, but then in the second half you're saying it could be the "technology to end all technologies", which has obvious value.
Yeah. I thought this could be confusing. What I mean is not that such technology is likely to appear any time soon; rather that it’s thought to be likely. It would certainly create value if it came along, but it’d also be the end of the world as we know it.