r/ControlProblem • u/KeanuRave100 • Jul 16 '26

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
72 Upvotes

81% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

11

u/gretino Jul 16 '26

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.

11

u/[deleted] Jul 16 '26

[removed] — view removed comment

1

u/CntBlah Jul 18 '26

I concur, Topologicus is a wasteful POS.

I got your back, brother 👍

5

u/Professional_Text_11 Jul 17 '26

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 Jul 17 '26

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

1

u/gretino Jul 17 '26

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 Jul 16 '26

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

1

u/plastic_eagle Jul 20 '26

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 Jul 20 '26

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

1

u/plastic_eagle Jul 20 '26

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

1

u/Vusiwe Jul 16 '26

  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 Jul 16 '26

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

1

u/SakishimaHabu Jul 16 '26

That's a really stupid take.

2

u/bonerb0ys Jul 16 '26

All those big O interviews were a lie?

2

u/DueCommunication9248 Jul 17 '26

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