Absolutely needed: to get high efficiency for this beast … as it gets better, we’ll become too dependent.
“all of this growth is for a new technology that’s still finding its footing, and in many applications—education, medical advice, legal analysis—might be the wrong tool for the job,”
The energy issue almost feels like a red herring for distracting all idiots from actual AI problems and lemmy is just gobbling it up every day. It’s so tiring.
That’s because it IS an issue, together with many other issues like disinformation, over reliance, wrong tools for wrong (most) jobs, etc.
The international energy agency estimates that the total electricity consumption for AI worldwide was around 415 TWh per year as of 2024. That’s more than the UK uses.
Partly, yep. Seems like every time I try to pin down an AI on a detail of a question worth asking - a math question, or a date in history, it’ll confidently reply with the first answer it finds … right or wrong.
I don’t think accuracy is an issue either. I’ve been on the web since inception and we always had a terribly inaccurate information landscape. It’s really about individual ability to put together found information to an accurate world model and LLMs is a tool just like any other.
The real issues imo are effects on society be it information manipulation, breaking our education and workforce systems. But all of that is overshadowed by meme issues like energy use or inaccuracy as these are easy to understand for any person while sociology, politics and macro economics are really hard.