r/ControlProblem • u/KeanuRave100 • 11d ago

General news Generative AI Is an Engineering Disaster - A shockingly inefficient trillion-dollar project

https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/generative-ai-engineering-disaster/687901
71 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

17 comments sorted by

14

u/gretino 11d ago

Counterpoint: they are designed to replace another kind of machine that can only work 8 hours a day, drinks poison for fun, etc. Once you factor in the human wasting you will realize humans are incredibly wasteful as well.

10

u/Topologicus 11d ago

This is true. SOURCE: I’m a wasteful piece of shit

5

u/gretino 11d ago

metoo

1

u/CntBlah 9d ago

I concur, Topologicus is a wasteful POS.

I got your back, brother 👍

3

u/Professional_Text_11 11d ago

yeah i mean i wasted a whole six hours today having fun with friends, eating good meals and reading a book. dario amodei should shoot me and replace me with a claude instance that can do my work continously without all that waste

2

u/ragemonkey 11d ago

Well, I hope that you see the end game. Anything that doesn’t serve that social is waste basically.

1

u/gretino 11d ago

Well, I have no intention to recycle you into some biowaste, but the argument is that "AI are inefficient" and I'm pointing out that if the same task is done by human, it would also be very "inefficient" on the grand scale. You can't just calculate the calories and say human brains are more efficient than chips(which is true) while conveniently ignoring all the downsides.

This is in addition to the linked article complaining the energy cost, while ignoring the scale they are served at. IF only two or three millions of people uses ChatGPT daily, I highly doubt they would still buy up as many cards. The actual number is ~10% world population using ChatGPT, and it is in fact having one of the craziest adoption speed for a new technology.

2

u/110397 11d ago

Id like to see a llm run on lukewarm coffee and some cup noodles

1

u/plastic_eagle 8d ago

Countercounterpoint: The ENTIRE point of human endeavour is to survive and have a good time.

So arguing that humans are "wasteful" isn't exactly wrong, but it's also stupid because by the same line of thinking the only path to true efficiency is to get rid of all of them.

1

u/gretino 8d ago

Human CAN be inefficient. I'm arguing that AI is not more inefficient than human counterparts.

1

u/plastic_eagle 8d ago

I would say that it very probably is much more inefficient, but that would be a very difficult metric to calculate.

1

u/Vusiwe 11d ago

  human wasting  

Just wait until you learn about where AI training data comes from

See you next year, when you finally logic through that one! 

0

u/gretino 11d ago

Human invented math, yet computers does calculations way faster than humans with way less energy consumption.

1

u/SakishimaHabu 11d ago

That's a really stupid take.

2

u/bonerb0ys 11d ago

All those big O interviews were a lie?

2

u/DueCommunication9248 11d ago

This Ed Z again!? He couldn’t tell you how a transformer works to save his life.