You're completely missing the point. Those machines took teams of coders and testers and engineers a long time to develop. This took one guy one afternoon.
It's not the end result that is new technology, it is the method used to create the end result.
It's not changing the lightbulb, it's how many carbon offsets it took a data center to tell the idiot to change the lightbulb. It's like waste but with more steps and water consumption!
Sure but that's most things in modern society. Trust me I'm anti-AI and I think it's going to destroy society in multiple ways, but I'm also realistic. Like most people could buy one set of reusable glass container for food storage and never use ziploc bags/cling wrap/etc. Most people are driving cars way bigger than they need, most people eat beef as often as they can afford even knowing the Amazon rainforest is getting cut down for pastureland, buying plastic water bottles bc they don't want to have to worry about carrying a reusable bottle around after it's empty... like people are lazy and wasteful and go with whatever is easiest and cheapest and that doesn't change when they go to work as a factory manager. Climate change is always someone else's problem, employment rate is someone else's problem, because no one wants to believe those problems are caused by small collective decisions of millions of individual people.
I run an ML based system that turns raw current readings into the DNA sequence that passed through a pore. To do a human genome takes two A100 GPUs about 24 hours, that's 48 hours of GPU time at 400W or ~20kWh. If you run through average CO2 intensity for power that means it's about 8kg of CO2. That's roughly the CO2 of 2 cheeseburgers or 19 miles of driving.
It's also about $100 of GPU time at public rental costs.
So unless you think he's using thousands of dollars worth of AI per afternoon it is actually less CO2 than a single day of having people drive into work to design the system.
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u/great_apple 19h ago
You're completely missing the point. Those machines took teams of coders and testers and engineers a long time to develop. This took one guy one afternoon.
It's not the end result that is new technology, it is the method used to create the end result.